Learn to do by doing!

There I’d be, every Saturday morning, gathered around a leader's kitchen table, chanting this, and whipping out my notebook with 8 or 10 other teen girls, ready to learn something about bread-making, or sewing, or some other domestic art. And laugh. Oh yes, we laughed a lot! This was community-building at its best. This was 4-H, circa 1982, East Wawanosh township.

I’ve been public about adding a unit to Weston’s housing stock by converting my garage into Chandlerville, my 550 sq ft custom home, and renting out my main house. I’ve reported, as did the Toronto Star in their March story, the $500K I spent on the project. Some Star readers were aggrieved at the price tag, accusing me of being a rich lawyer and pointing out the pointlessness of a by-law that doesn’t allow most people to participate. I agree. They’re not inexpensive and so, as with any other construction, building a laneway suite, garden suite, or any other kind of accessory dwelling unit (or ADU as they’re known) won’t be for everyone. But maybe they should be open to more people if we are going to make a dent in this housing crisis.

Growing up on the farm, Toronto-living seemed a faraway yet alluring aspiration. You see, my family was from away. No, not Toronto, but yes, away. Being from away in a rural Ontario community brings with it positives - no blueprint laid out for my life, being the primary one - but also, sadly, negatives. It’s hard to ever quite fit in when your neighbours have the overlapping, deep roots of a wild carrot, introduced by settlers hundreds of years ago and now invasive, while you’re like a transplanted palm, nourished by a different soil. Despite feeling like I was growing in a different, yet adjacent garden, I engaged in local teen activities like gravel running (perhaps a future blog topic), 4H (definitely one for a future blog), and attending events like maple syrup festivals, fall fairs, stag and does, snowmobile hut parties, and open wedding receptions. Oh yes, I tried very hard to be a little fitter-inner, although will forever feel like weird barbie in my hometown.

In fact, my issues had started even sooner. Clothes shopping with my mother through elementary school was a teary exercise that routinely escalated to anger, especially as I progressed into the hormonal agony of puberty. Although I’d always been a chubby kid, my grade 5 teacher had done a number on me when he published the numbers. That’s right, he wrote our weights on the board from biggest to littlest number and there was mine at #2, right under the kid who was THE FAT KID. (I often wonder what happened to him, poor guy, although being a fat boy is no-where near as traumatic as being a fat girl). I was used to being at the top of lists in school but this one was a blow. Nearly 50 years later, I’ve neither forgiven nor forgotten that asshole who taught me nothing other than shame and humiliation.

People routinely admit to being bad cooks, inconsistent parents, not mechanically inclined, lazy gardeners, crappy at training their dogs, and couch potatoes. But never have I ever heard anyone say they’re a bad driver. The 400 series highways this Victoria Day holiday weekend, however, looks like a convention of them, featuring a meeting of the subcommittee, Masters of the Left Lane. 

Let’s go back to August 2020. Like most of you, I had some time on my hands. Unlike many, though, my time was solitary. Caught up in my own head, and my own very recent memories of caregiving for my husband, Jack, and his subsequent medically assisted death, I decided to jot down a quick table of contents for a book I might one day write. Three months later, I raised my head again to realize my table of contents had turned into the beginning of a manuscript, totalling about 60,000 words. The thing is, I knew next to nothing about writing, not having studied English since high school, and never having taken a creative writing course. I certainly knew nothing about writing memoir. I discovered Alison Wearing’s course, Memoir Writing Ink, and ploughed through it in early 2021. 

Imagine you’re 23 years into a marriage and you’ve never laid eyes on your husband’s siblings or children. Or that you’re 25 years into a new country and have never been back. Or you’ve never really been on a vacation, because, well, the cows need milking twice a day. This was my mother’s circumstance when we took our first family trip to the UK in 1974, 50 years ago. 

My mother immigrated to Canada in 1949 at the age of 21, joining her parents and brothers who had arrived earlier that same year. On their crossing (remember - boats, not planes) they’d befriended a young wannabe farmhand from London (the real one), traveling solo. They felt a connection, being farmers themselves who were relocating to find less expensive land and less grim post-war conditions. After Mom arrived, it was just a matter of time before they introduced her to this Londoner, and then not long after that when she married him. Despite having vowed to herself she wouldn’t marry a farmer, knowing farm-life is not easy, she nonetheless was drawn to Dad because of their shared experience as young immigrants in a country that, while still having strong ties to the mothership, was nonetheless full of foreign customs. 

I decided in January that 2024 is the year to bring my writing up a notch. Part of better writing is more reading, we’re told, so I set a modest target of finishing two books a month. You know from a previous blog, my TBR pile was due for a winnowing, so this performance goal ticked two boxes. And what a great group of books I had on deck! I kicked the year off by finishing American, Barbara Kingsolver’s, Pulitzer winning novel, Demon Copperhead. Full disclosure-  I started reading it in December 2023, but it’s a long one so I think it’s fair to include it in the 2024 accomplishments. Twenty years ago, I’d been on a little Kingsolver blitz, tearing through Poisonwood Bible and The Prodigal Summer but then I went off her. Not sure why because her plots are as engaging as her language is readable. This latest one was on the reading list for a literary lecture series I subscribed to this winter at Yorkville’s Heliconian Club.* The Heliconian crowd pick great books, among them, Demon Copperhead. The character, Demon Copperhead, is a modern day David Copperfield. Instead of struggling to survive in the Dickensian London of late the 19th century, Kingsolver has set this in the Appalachia of the oxycontin era. Demon is a sympathetic character who falls for the allure of painkillers after a football injury. While the parallels to Dickens original novel were largely lost on me - it’s been decades since I soldiered through it - I loved Demon and I loved this book. It’s so accessible proving the point that good writing doesn’t mean you have to target just the literary crowd. Gives me some comfort since, well, obviously I’m not a writers’ writer. 

Just saw my first D series licence plate. Couldn’t help but think back to the last conversation I had with my father before he died 17+ years ago. Memory is a funny thing.

I’ve always had a memory for licence plates. The series of green Fords my parents drove in the early 70s each wore FDK 999, below the Ontario slogan du jour, “keep it beautiful.” In those days, the plates stayed with the owner, not the car. While it didn’t yet apply to my life, I bet it made staying hotels easier. No yelling “hey, do you remember my plate number?” across lobbies to whomever you’re with. The letter/number combo was etched in your memory alongside your seven digit phone number and your locker combination. Sometime mid-70s, they changed the policy - plates went with cars. On the 1975 amber Ford Maverick, our plate was HUA 537.