Tinkers

by Paul Harding

Harper Collins
2009

George Washington Crosbylies dying of cancer in his living room while his family keeps watch. His death provides the framework for the real story, which is about his unsteady relationship with Howard, his father.

At times George is lucid, recalling notable incidents of triumph and tragedy from his life as clearly as a newspaper reporter. Often, though, he slips into prose poems that seem to have little bearing on the story but perfectly reflect the semi-dreaming state of his mind.

"When his grandchildren had been little, they had asked if they could hide inside the clock. Now he wanted to gather them and open himself up, and hide them among his ribs and faintly ticking heart."

This novel touched me deeply because it brought up the memories of my uneasy love/hate relationship with my own father. As I move more and more toward the end of my life, I reflect often on the past - my place in it and my family relationships. They seem so incredibly important now, and earlier not given the smallest thought.

Breakfast at the Exit Cafe

Travels through America
Merilyn Simonds/Wayne Grady
Greystone Books 2010



In December 2006, husband and wife Wayne Grady and Merilyn Simonds decided to take the long way home from Vancouver to Ontario. Anxious to avoid winter driving, and eager to experience America – a nation they knew only from depictions in books and movies – they opted to drive down the Pacific Coast, cross the continent through the southern states, and finish their journey along the eastern seaboard. They set off in their trusty Toyota Echo with “no itinerary, no agenda” – except to make it to the Grand Canyon by Christmas Day and to discover the perfect hash brown.

For Grady, whose forebears were slaves who came to Canada in the 1870s, it becomes a journey through fear of racism and violence into his own family roots in the American Deep South. For Simonds, who grew up a lonely Canadian in the American School of Campinas, Brazil, it becomes a journey into the heart of the ex-pat promised land, the nation of the American Dream.

Part travelogue, part exploration, part mid-winter love story, this is a journey into the heart of the next-door eighbor we thought we knew. There are frequent side trips into fascinating nooks of history, geography and literature.

The Americans they meet along the way - eating in restaurants, manning motel offices, waiting in line for the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day parade - illuminate a country dissolving in the grip of the final years of the Bush administration.

True Home

Anny Scoones
Touchwood Editions
2010



I love this series - Anny Scoones lives near my home, and I visit often to buy eggs from her heritage chickens and ducks. Duck eggs make the most delicious omelettes.

This is the third in her series about life at Glamorgan, a heritage farm where she raises heritage breeds of chickens and ducks, goats and horses, geese and turkeys. She loves pigs passionately. Two great Gloucester Old Spot sows named Mabel and Matilda each weigh more than seven hundred pounds. The breed is considered extinct in Canada, and she loves to show them off the the Saanichton Fair in the fall.

Many stray and rescued animals come to live - cats and dogs came to live out their days in peace. Bee was an old cat who came from a rescue organization. Anny said, "I'll take an old cat." Older cats never get adopted. The girl who was a volunteer said, "This is Honey Bee. She was found half alive in the gutter downtown. Nobody wants her, and she's ancient - she should live out her final days at a peaceful home. Take her home to die." Winnie was an elegant feral calico rescued from the crazy cat place where the old woman had lived alone with fifty cats Norman was found by a cat rescue society in a back alley in a seedy party of town.

Some come as gifts. Jasmine and Ju-Jube are two of Jake, the Drake's, five immaculate wives - the others are Jemima, Jewel, and Jessica. Jake is afraid of water so is usually filthy. He only ever put his head in the water and never bathed.

I laughed when I read about her joining a yoga class. She had a stiff, sore neck from a fall on the ice during the previous winter. Her pig veterinarian recommended yoga - "she looked fit and calm and healthy - the mayor did yoga, she was my divorce lawyer  years ago." And she resisted the whole idea.

the whole idea of having to wear skin-tight pants, which show every lump on your thighs plus a pot-bellied midsection; having to go barefoot, which shows all the thick deformed toenails, overlapping, calloused toes and bunions, and having to lie down on a rubber mat that other people have probably perspired on - the whole thing mad me rather cynical. But I thought if it helped my stiff neck, I'd give it a shot.

I was completely self-conscious. The whole thing for me was totally embarrassing. I lay on my sticky rubber mat in my tight pants, and listened to the instructor. She told us to close our eyes and 'observe our breath' and to forget all thoughts. Lying on my back was killing my neck.

Finallly came some silence, and I realized that silence with people is really uncomfortable to me, but silence in the woods, or silence with my dear old sows or with my cabbages gives me bliss and serenity, a deep contentment. She read a short quote from a Buddhist teacher whose name is Thich Nhat Hanh. He talked about Home and how true home is now. This moment is what is important. This moment is our true home.

That's why I decided to call my third and final book about Glamorgan Farm True Home.

Anny read from this latest book last month at a local cafe. She said this will be the last book about the farm. There are other books to come, and I look forward to whatever comes next.

Risotto with Nettles

a Memoir with Food

Anna Del Conte
Random House
London 2009


She was born and grew up in Milan. When war came to Italy, her family had to abandon their apartment and the city for the countryside. Peasants still ate well, but life was dangerous.

This is a memoir of a life seen through food - there are recipes and memories of her native land - from lemon granita to wartime risotto with nettles.

I stumbled across this book quite by accident when I was browsing in our local bookshop. The title caught my eye immediately. Nettles have been important in my life on several occasions and in different places. When we were living at the farm on the island, Glen and I picked the young and tender nettles for dinner. Boiled and served with butter and salt and pepper - delicious with small new potatoes. Later in the season, when they' grown older and tougher, I used them as dye material for spinning and weaving. They produced a gorgeous soft, pale green color.

Anna and her family were evacuated in 1942 to Albinea, a village in the foothills of the Apennines. Life was quiet and peaceful for a year. Then they were moved out of Villa Viani and into the villino next door. It was a cramped and more primitive lodging - there was a lavatory but no bathroom and no heating. Once a week they'd put a large zinc tub in the kitchen and pour hot water from jugs to have a proper, all-over wash.

I went to prison twice during the war, once in February 1944, and the second time in the following December.

After the war in 1946, she moved in with her parents in Milan, and in 1949 moved to London - "a culinary wasteland". She married an Englishman, and while bringing up her children, she wrote books which inspired a new generation of cooks.

I'm not sure which I enjoy most - the stories or the recipes - all sounding quite delicious and unusual.

This one's for you, Nan. I'll miss you

Edge of the Taos Desert

An Escape to Reality

Mabel Dodge Luhan
University of New Mexico Press
Albuquerque 1937

This is an autobiographical account describing Luhan's first months in New Mexico.

In 1917 Mabel Sterne, patron of the arts and spokeswoman for the New York avant-garde, came to the Southwest seeking a new life. This autobiographical account, long out-of-print, of her first few months in New Mexico is a remarkable description of an Easterner's journey to the American West. It is also a great story of personal and philosophical transformation. The geography of New Mexico and the culture of the Pueblo Indians opened a new world for Mabel. She settled in Taos immediately and lived there the rest of her life. Much of this book describes her growing fascination with Antonio Luhan of Taos Pueblo, whom she subsequently married. Her descriptions of the appeal of primitive New Mexico to a world-weary New Yorker are still fresh and moving.

She put Taos on the map of the international avant-garde, bringing, among her scores of visitors, D. H. Lawrence, Georgia O'Keeffe, Willa Cather, and Ansel Adams. In prose, paint, poetry, and photography, all of them celebrated her frontier paradise.

I'm reading this again now because we watched a movie this week about Georgia O'Keefe. It was so beautiful, and the caste was magnificent - Joan Allen and Jeremy Irons; Tyne Daly played Mabel Luhan. Seeing again the lush and colorful landscape of New Mexico made me long for the tiny cabin there where I spent one glorious year at Jemez Springs in Northern New Mexico, not far from Taos.

Winter in Taos
first published in 1935
by Haracourt Brace


"Winter in Taos" unfolds in an entirely different pattern, uncluttered with noteworthy names and ornate details. With no chapters dividing the narrative, Luhan describes her simple life in Taos, New Mexico, this "new world" she called it, from season to season, following a thread that spools out from her consciousness as if she's recording her thoughts in a journal. "My pleasure is in being very still and sensing things," she writes, sharing that pleasure with the reader by describing the joys of adobe rooms warmed in winter by aromatic cedar fires; fragrant in spring with flowers; and scented with homegrown fruits and vegetables being preserved and pickled in summer. Having wandered the world, Luhan found her home at last in Taos. "Winter in Taos" celebrates the spiritual connection she established with the "deep living earth" as well as the bonds she forged with Tony Luhan, her "mountain."

This moving tribute to a land and the people who eked a life from it reminds readers that in northern New Mexico, where the seasons can be harshly beautiful, one can bathe in the sunshine until "'untied are the knots in the heart,' for there is nothing like the sun for smoothing out all difficulties." Born in 1879 to a wealthy Buffalo family, Mabel Dodge Luhan earned fame for herfriendships with American and European artists, writers and intellectuals and for her influential salons held in her Italian villa and Greenwich Village apartments. In 1917, weary of society and wary of a world steeped in war, she set down roots in remote Taos, New Mexico, then publicized the tiny town's inspirational beauty to the world, drawing a steady stream of significant guests to her adobe estate, including artist Georgia O'Keeffe, poet Robinson Jeffers, and authors D.H. Lawrence and Willa Cather. Luhan could be difficult, complex and often cruel, yet she was also generous and supportive, establishing a solid reputation as a patron of the arts and as an author of widely read autobiographies. She died in Taos in 1962.

Two Canadian Authors

February
Lisa Moore
Harper Collins Canada 2009

nominated for the
Scotiabank Giller Prize


In her external life, Helen O'Mara cleans and does yoga and looks after her grandchildren and shakes hands with solitude. In her internal life, she continually revisits Cal, who drowned when in 1982 the oil rig Ocean Ranger sank off the coast of Newfoundland during a Valentine's Day storm.

This book caught me at the first paragraph wherein the author describes skate sharpening -

Helen watches as the man touches the skate blade to the sharpener.  There is a stainless steel cone to catch the spray of orange sparks that fly up

It took me right back to my childhood in Toronto where we skated every day after school until dark. I could smell the wet mitts and soggy socks in the tuck shop.

And then on the second page she let her grandson take a quarter to buy a jawbreaker - his mother will be furious. Timmy doesn't eat his vegetables - he lives on macaroni and cheese. They have rules - Helen's daughters all have rules. This sentence grabbed me by the heart and wouldn't let go

The fate of the world can hang on a jawbreaker




The Flying Troutmans
Miriam Toews
Alfred Knoff Canada 2008


Hattie has just been dumped by her Paris boyfriend, her sister Min is going through a particularly dark period, and Min's two kids are not talking or talking way too much.

Hattie returns home to Canada after receiving an SOS call from eleven-year-old Thebes that Min is on the way to a psychiatric ward. She quickly realizes that she is way out of her league and hatches a hare-brained plan to find the kids' long-lost father. They hit the road and head south.

One reviewer, Kevin Sampsell, said:

Who wouldn't want to go on a road trip with Miriam Toews?


This is another top notch delight in an increasingly brilliant career. The best thing about MT's writing is that it manages to be both cool and heartbreakingly sweet. The dialogue is the best thing out of Canada since the movie "Highway 61" and the characters are complex and deeply felt. I am going to marry this book. We will be registered at Macy's

The Bark of the Dogwood

This book sat on the bedside table for many months before I finally started to read it. I thought it was about trees and landscaping and architecture and heritage buildings. I bought it because the cover was beautiful and the reference to "dogwood" appealed because that's our provincial flower. In April, our towns and cities and villages have masses of dogwood trees in bloom.


The subtitle was misleading ... I wonder if that was intentional? This is a series of stories written by a transplanted Southerner now living in New York. Writing an article for a magazine assignment, he returns to his roots and examines such delicate topics as race, sexual orientation, family dysfunction, mid-life crisis. He remembers things in his not-too-distant past and especially the most horrific event in his life that had been obscured until now.


I'm re-reading this now because I bought a book about a house this morning. One reviewer compared it to this one. It's hard to put down .... lots of funny bits, humor and horror ... one reviewer said, "not for the faint-hearted".