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Month: November 2013

  • Walking Night

    I love walking at night this time of year, especially when it’s mild. I can leave my hood down and listen and see and be touched. Maybe there’s laughter or music from a house party at the end of the block. I may run into a snowshoe hare or pass through light pouring out of someone’s picture window. I may watch the moon rise.

    I think this love of darkness and its contrasts (like my love of summer thunderstorms) came early, growing up in northern Alberta. I often went for a night walk through the pasture or hayfield or along the road allowance that ran east of our farm as a kid. I remember our grade five science book had a chapter on stars and we had to stand out at 30 below (Fahrenheit) and find all the constellations. I went out every night after supper and kept going out, long after the assignment was done. And when I think about it, what I still like about walking at night is the feeling of being alone in the universe, and at the same time, being lifted up and embraced. I wonder if it’s the same feeling we have in the womb. Whatever it is, I never cease to be thrilled by the fall of night.

  • Writing Food

    I’ve recently discovered Ruth Reichl,  who some will call a food writer; I think she’s first and foremost a storyteller. She’s the author and editor of  several books, former restaurant critic for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Editor-in-Chief of Gourmet Magazine and other lauds.  I’ve just finished Comfort Me with Apples and For You, Mom, Finally.  Her books are about food (there are recipes every chapter and most of them have an emotional connection), but they’re also about the relationships that happen around food, the hope and heartbreak of every life: birth, death, passion, loss, family and friendship told by an extraordinary human being. For You, Mom, Finally is about her relationship with her mother. Ruth’s mother was bi-polar and when her mother was manic she loved to entertain, often with food that was well past its best before date. It was an intense introduction to food, one that  profoundly shaped the author. Reichl reminds me in some ways of another memoirist, Kate Llewellyn, an Australian, whose garden (The Waterlily) and travel writing are likewise filled with allusions to affairs of the heart.