I went through a period in my late 30s where I was trying to figure out what my relationship was to having children. Facing the fact that whatever choice I made would be for forever. Feeling the medical pressure of being at a crossroads where ideal biological conditions and being single met. Approaching the reproductive cul de sac.
 
I made a decision of golden proportions. I chose no children. It was not a flighty-uninformed-selfish-crazy-hasty-flip-of-the-switch decision like I don’t know how to live my life. I gave it thoughtful consideration. I could care less about most opinions on the issue. How soon can we colonize Mars with the people who are emotional wrecks over my right to choose?
 
My parents knew the strength of my spirit. I did not feel a great pressure to be anything else but me. But there were no era-marking celebrations for me. I will never tie a paper plate of bows to my head or unwrap a breast pump. To the pronatalist, I’m a loser. That reminds me of one of my heroes, Lisa Simpson.
 
I knew enough to leave my heart open to have relationships with children and parents. There are aspects of a family I need. And I’m a lesson for people who hold a stereotype of mature women — like we’re all Stepford Wife-style grey-haired grannies. I’m a challenge to some and that’s something to be proud of.  
 
My mom would come to terms with never having grandchild news — a sometimes toxic, highly competitive landscape she’s been spared. She adjusted nicely. But I understand the loss too when I think of the pleasure of holding my grandfather Harry’s calloused hand.
 
I’m thrilled with how it worked out. Squeezing into the hetero-patriarchal mold is not all that, amen. 
 
***
 
When I see Borlotti beans in their pods, it takes me straight back to my dad. We’d buy a bushel basket at the Centre Mall market in Hamilton on a Saturday morning around this time of year and then spend a few hours in the afternoon shelling. The feel of the velvet talcum residue on the pods — dirt from the field transferred to my hands. Driving country roads past bean fields that look apocalyptic just before harvest. Store fresh beans in the freezer. They cook up tender quick and are best simmered with loads of vegetables and herbs.
 
A note for some cooks and bakers, it’s time to fill up your wallet and buy the dried ingredients to macerate for fruitcake. Get the best you can afford and mess around with flavors. Even an economy model fruitcake is a work of wonder. My magic mix includes dried cherries, currants, apricots, golden raisins, Flame raisins, candied ginger, and peel. I’m team rum. Also, start thinking about fruitcake’s favorite side squeezes —  aged cheddar and quality milky tea.

***
September is for Dahlia lovers. Here too.
 
This wins Instagram this week. 

This six part podcast tracing Joni Mitchell's career is fantastic. Her commitment to the creative process and her indomitable spirit are something to admire.
 
***
 
I’m thinking about the voices of North American protest. I began with women when I shared a few tracks of Roberta Flack’s Compared to What as a high watermark a few weeks ago.
 
At the tenth hour, I was offered a single ticket to see Joan Baez at Roy Thomson Hall in 2018. (Come to Toronto for our stellar music venues.) A great deal of intimate enrichment happens when you go to a cultural event alone. It’s a good practice and I felt full up on her music that night. She’s in a top spot here for good reason. One of many voices from the March on Washington.
 
Stevie Wonder with the Jackson Five giving it to Richard Nixon and playing his fingers over the keyboard like butterflies while we all groove. Seeing the back of some “politicians” is sweet.

Willie Dunn's baritone voice, guitar and words. 

​There’d be a long row of broccoli if I had a garden.

I steam it until just before it crumbles, then toss it tenderly with an insane amount of butter and flaky salt. I can eat a lot of it and don’t care if there’s nothing else. I had some of that head left to crush with leftover steamed fingerlings for a quick mash — it was second-day delicious. Stir-fried broccoli with lots of half-crisp onion crescents, garlic, ginger, mushrooms, and black bean paste is so good. A cook’s treat is the peeled stem eaten raw while I’m pulling dinner together. Why would you ever buy crowns?

***

A year ago, the west end of Bloor Street went through a metamorphosis. The stretch I live on went from a four-lane speed trap to a proper boulevard. One lane was removed for cyclists, the speed limit dropped to 40 mph, and planters were installed as barriers. A downtown pinko's dream. The nights here are quieter. On Sunday mornings, I hear the whir of racing bike tires when a peloton passes on the way to High Park. There hasn’t been a single accident. Months before the work began, I spent what felt like an eternity holding the hand of a catatonic young man who’d hit a speeding motorcycle right out front. Mixed-use roadways are inclusive and civilized. I like looking out my front window at dusk and seeing the long trail of red taillights snaking toward downtown. There is enough time to admire a classic car passing — like this intoxicating '68 Chevrolet Corvette convertible. Driver inconvenience does not bother me. The east-west axis is well served by a subway. I want to believe property value and business benefit from the change. Let me bury you in urban studies.

***

September is a sultry month. I walked south along the Humber River to an appointment this week, parkland all the way. The quality of late summer light in the morning is something. The sky was azure, the sun made a silver shimmer on the river, and the vegetation along the path was a wild tangle of skeletal seed heads and late blooms. 

​***

This is a loving tribute. My writer's heart melted reading it. Mentors are everything. Thank you, Katie Ward, for stitching those words together. 

I booked an hour of a librarian’s time through the Toronto Public Library. Where is my crown? I had three specific questions about their collection and international library access. The response I got was thorough. Brilliantly helpful. Librarians are superheroes of democracy. They are on the front line.

I read everything about Peggy Guggenheim. "For it was while staying at Yew Tree that the budding gallerist began to reframe her life, seriously considering her long-held desire of opening her own art museum." The privilege in buying a painting a day.

This interview on funk music with D’Angelo is thoughtful — he is a pro and knows where he fits. The intro is pulse-raising. What he says about Prince is right. The list of bands he offers is a gift.

I keep your notes in a file labelled "for the days of doubt." 

***

This week’s mood was R&B. The beauty of the collaboration in the first song. Then Snoh Aalegra followed by D’Angelo. Her angelic voice...the tension he creates with the keyboard...their vocal range...his live performance. Imagine the thrill of being in an audience full of feeling. A community singing along, “Won’t you get closer.”

My father wrote letters to politicians. The kind that got him annual Christmas greetings from men like Brian Mulroney. A well-set photo on nice cardstock — Canadian posh. He hung out smiling on the shelf above my dad’s desk where I could give him a side eye.  
 
Democracy is a demonstration. It is a multi-tasking action — exercising your voice and chasing off cynicism. I miss having political conversations with him. We’d regularly talk events through on the phone because we were interested and tried to stay informed. I wish I’d recorded some of those conversations to hear his voice again and get reassurance.
 
In the past month, I’ve written letters to federal and provincial government members across party lines about the temporary foreign worker program, and about food bank use rising to over a million in Ontario. Human security concerning housing, jobs, and food is an essential contract with our governments. The issues are non-partisan and serious enough to demand a response that isn’t racism or posturing. People are not being served.
 
I’m fed up and put that energy, time, and talent to good use. Putting words together is how I contribute. I can get to the point quick and am mindful of not wearing out the welcome. 
 
***
 
Our national apple. The McIntosh. The pride of the country, in a basket with so many other regional beauties. 
 
When perfect, the skin’s so taut you can almost see your reflection. The memory of the crisp, saliva-triggering tart-sweetness of biting into one as a kid. Lush and milky. A frothy drink of freshness. The season is a day long. I buy them one at a time. Like their blossoms, spectacularly here and then gone.  

​Small wins:

Discovering Melissa L. Sevigny this week was a miracle. I followed her trail and now I’m waiting for one of her books to show up on the hold’s shelf at the library.  
 
A heartwarming tribute to Mr. Jack Long of Long & McQuade. “Jack’s generosity was legendary…If you told him your circumstances, he’d go to his staff and say, ‘Cut this person a deal.’ That caring approach carried throughout all his stores.” 
 
This little bit of sanity about research and the comments and quote posts that extend out from it.  
 
Stunning glazes and structure. Japanese ceramics on social media. 
 
I had no idea that YouTube caps a playlist at 200 songs. I’ve started today volume two. 
 
***
 
A fine example of the power in the singer. Both versions are stunning. 

It’s the grande allée between green bean and Hubbard squash season. Maybe my favourite vegetables. Sorry, celery root. 
 
I like to blanch beans, quickly fry them with garlic, and snug them against a roast chicken. Good hunger is standing beside my friend Ghaithaa at the stove while she makes Fasoulia with the flat green beans she loves. Sizzling heaps of thinly sliced garlic and green onions in ghee.
 
An embarrassment of salted butter is all a roasted Hubbard squash needs. 
 
The garden grows like a fever in September. A desire path, a wheelbarrow tire wide runs between it and the kitchen.
 
***
 
Scarlet rosehips are luminous in the dinnertime sun. A geisha’s lips. Spent blooms hang like an Issey Miyake among them. The Rosa Blanda metamorphosis. The scent on a hot July night hangs in memory’s closet.
 
***
 
I recognise myself as a writer while reading Duncan J. Watts, Five Feet at a Time. I’m working on a project and striking out in several directions, like the ink blots. A colleague once commented on my mind-map note-taking. My concentration on one thing caps out at three hours. Of course, I can get caught in a flow that lasts a day. But in figuring out how to be productive, I’m learning to flip the switch. And the solo climber metaphor he uses in the title is the way. 

***
 
I don’t have much extra, but there’s always enough for: 
 
Eating cassis sorbet in Trinity Bellwoods. The French know how to extract the lush essence from fruit. Ripeness has to rise above the numbing effect of cold. In flavour and texture, sorbet is a masterclass.
 
Stopping at the Polish deli for a raspberry donut. Two quarters change back from two dollars. A cheap thrill. Puffed like a foam pillow stuffed in a velum sugar case. Carried home in a small brown paper bag. Eaten while I make coffee. 
 
***
 
The songs go out to a friend from high school.

​“Their increasing liberation makes the country itself more beautiful.” 
 
Sentiment for the times. 
 
Rebecca Traister on Thelma and Louise. Maybe the best paragraph about a movie ever written:
 
“It’s not just that Thelma and Louise get inarguably hotter with every discarded lipstick, floral blouse, and trapping of conventional femininity; it’s that, in Khouri’s script and through director Ridley Scott’s lens, along the geographically impossible road from Oklahoma to Mexico, their increasing liberation makes the country itself more beautiful, both to them and to us. These women and their willingness to disobey, hang up on, laugh at, and even kill the men who degrade and underestimate them are not a blight on the nation; rather, their trek west, toward imagined freedom, flatters America, lights it up from within.”
 
***
 
Eating three perfect Ontario peaches in two days in the last week of August is haute seasonal. Like Gucci, but fruit. A Las Vegas fountain for the taste buds — passionfruit and tamarind and lime and agave and what-else. 
 
A few days later, they were mealy. The season comes to a smoke and screeching tires halt. Louise behind the wheel of the Tahoe Turquoise 1966 Ford Thunderbird Convertible — "peaches."

Stories of the week: 
 
“This paragraph took three fucking hours.” Ed Yong on practiced intentionality. Crazy good.
 
A guitar and a mahogany tree from The Met.
 
***
 
There was a trickle of emails waiting for me on waking last Sunday — messages about orchards. Thank you, universe. 
 
One from a friend telling me of a heritage apple tree they inherited with their Wolfe Island property — a St. Lawrence. The poetic embrace of location and tree. The watercolour by Deborah Griscom Passmore is on page 144 of The Ghost Orchard. 
 
If you’d like to get today by email, please send me your address. Then check your junk mail.
 
***
 
Music from two women. The Maya Delilah song is a new jewel. Phoebe Bridgers singing Metallica.