mood: the myths drift like kites
music: air fountain, wool strings

"Life on this knuckle of cliff is lived at the edge of time. The village, strung along taut fingers of rugged hillside, has long since turned its back on England to reach for the elements, each small home defiantly lit at night against danger, pressing against its neighbour to gain a view of the sea's parade. And all around this stubbornness, the sea extends itself, connected and absolute. Rocked by the wind's uncertainty, lichen from overhanging rock hovers over a million conversations of water. But for all its force, no gale disturbs the salt-starched bushes further up the cliff, pillars of longing and regret, their windblown heads forever looking back toward the mainland of their home."

Rachel Manley, Horses in Her Hair

traveling through streets full of whimsy; an old man standing alone at the health food store, his face folded in concentration while he trembles sesame butter into the counter-top container (carefully inspecting each hand for delicate stains, these opulent betrayals). in midafternoon sunlight, the wooden floors are burnished with wet footsteps & the pattern of motion (here, progress is slow). and on slushy subway platforms, commuters weighed down with lunchboxes & shopping bags wait to go home. ("viens ici." she whispers this across the open space of the train. she smiles when his fingers touch the sleeve of her coat.) a little girl is led down king street, a hat pulled right over her eyes.

in the kitchen everything glows with christmas; chocolate-covered figs, passionfruit curd, molasses sugarcookies, candied peel for panettonne, chopped ginger-root & toasted pine-nuts.

there are things i will always want to give you; the ruined foundations of falling-down farms, a blue antiquarian forest, eggnog steeped in earl-grey, knitted socks & words implacable as desire.

kindling days

music: up the long tracks, beatbeat whisper
mood: tutli-putli

stop, look & listen.

i am submerged with gratitude for small gestures of home: snowshoes by the front door, sleighbells in the garden. time-softened towels, drinking tea with k. (cups & saucers, delicate cranberry-almond rectangles), the hollow bowls of miso that dad & i sip on our way home from the train-station. tomorrow, we are going to bake all the best of my grandmother's handwritten recipes. my laundry is spinning happily in the dryer & i am sitting here with coffee & the distant grumbling of a familiar house: dishes & cupboards in the kitchen, the snapping of a hearth-fire, traditional carols & a dull rustle like the turning of pages.

the train-ride from halifax was full of familiar faces, but mostly i didn't feel like talking. instead i slept under my coat, alternately reading & watching for the constant swoosh of telephone poles and wires (there is so much snow in the depths of new brunswick). but we all gathered together at cafe tables in the montreal station, drinking tepid coffee & talking sleepily about directions. it is both a steadiness of motion and also a timing, and i left halifax without needing to seek refuge.

before dinner, i bundled into as many sweaters as could fit under my coat and went out to the five o'clock darkness, to the snow-laden orchard where broomstick branches & footprints & aloneness gather. a violet glowing from greenhouse windows & amber lights of the kitchen reflect on the ground, stir the gathering wind. the lake is supposed to freeze tonight, calm & deep enough for skating. in the orchard i could hear such stillness and everywhere, the stars.

the baroness redecorates

listen: the four seasons, op. 8/4, RV 297, "winter" - antonio vivaldi
mood: the pastness of past

caught up with the mean reds, mostly means reading, too much thinking of thoughts, cold tea & stomping around the flat after midnight. abandoned books & hot chocolate in the library lobby; all the vagaries & grand, sweeping gestures of procrastination. i am finished book one of war & peace.

yesterday, i walked to my favourite house on tower road in the rain & blustering (under the streetlamps, swirling birds or leaves or moths). i stood for a while beside dark windows, damp & full with presentiment that in a year's time, i don't know where (and in that moment, the certainty that it cannot be the impalpable here). to be sometimes so windblown & without direction.

so we sit at your kitchen table, eating disappointment & the thick-skinned clementines until our mouths begin to burn.

nobody, not even the rain

music: dry grass & shadows, alela diane
mood: breakfastasleep in bed

finished with school means long-awaited lazy mondays curled around tolstoy (this year's reading list is war & peace) and sunlight & blue sky filtering through the shadow-blotted snowdrifts on the ceiling of my room.

really exciting news arrived in the middle of yesterday's doldrumming rainstorm and when i woke up, all the trees were covered in snow.

back to book one, but more later.

"We are students of words; we are shut up in schools, and colleges,

and recitation rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last
with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing."