Guardian Angel (or, don't leave your wallet on top of your car)

I put my wallet on top of the car so that I could take a selfie at the gas station. That’s stupid, I told myself as I did it. You’ll regret that. Don’t do it.

But I put my wallet on top of my car, anyway, and took the photo and posted it, before gassing up before hitting the road to Winnipeg, where Elan and I had decided to meet for the weekend to work and play and eat great food and wander streets and hang out and go to the Canadian Museum for Human Rights and have long, blue-sky conversations about the Future of Work and Life and Anthology and Everything. And then I got into my car and I drove off. 

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And then I realized within a minute exactly what I had done. By the time I got back to the gas station — remembering to inhale and exhale and drum, drum drumming my hands on the steering wheel during the agonizingly long red light between me and my fears — my wallet was gone. Not on the ground next to the pump. The attendant inside hadn’t seen it.

And so I stood in the parking lot of the gas station for a moment, trying to figure out my next steps. I had a car and a full tank of gas, but now no driver’s license or credit card or bank card or cash. So, really, I wouldn’t be able to make it to Winnipeg, would I? Not really. Not legally, or easily, not without a Guardian Angel to bankroll me, in cash, now. Did I have a Guardian Angel?

I was just processing all this fallout when a man drove up in a red truck.

“Are you looking for something?” he asked.

I don’t think I’ve ever actually uttered the words “Bless you,” before in my life (at least, not anyone who hadn’t just sneezed) but I did, then.

(It didn't even occur to me to open my wallet, check to make sure that everything was there. Because I knew it would be. And it was.)

And then I got on the road, and I drove, listening to Cheryl Strayed read from Tiny Beautiful Things, and that book is my new religion. I still need to reread it at a couple of million times and process it, but I'll take this lesson from it, for now: that little voice in your head? The one that says, That's stupid? The one that says, You'll regret that. Don't do it. Listen to that voice, and then also listen to it when it says, Do that thing, that thing that you're so scared to do. Because that thing will save your life. And also: You are surrounded by Guardian Angels. You just need to meet them, and also be one when called.

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PS: Elan and I stayed in Winnipeg courtesy of Executive Suites by Roseman. The accommodations were lovely — comfy beds, fully appointed kitchen, easy-on-the-eyes decor. I'm guessing our Winnipeg digs were one reason why it took so much effort for us to actually venture out into the city; it was too easy to stay in and just hang out. Roseman put us up (thank you!), but I'm not otherwise compensated for this post, and all opinions are my own.

Crimson gold

I may be overdoing it with the raspberries.

It’s just that they’re everywhere, literally ripe for the picking, low-hanging fruit, all the clichés. I can trudge through the back lanes of my neighbourhood and emerge with a couple of yogurt containers’ worth of berries in under an hour, my fingers stained red like I’m some urban foraging vigilante — hey! Another cliché for you: caught red-handed. Not that anyone’s guarding them, not that anyone owns them; they’ve just colonized the spaces between the backyards, brilliant flashes of red weighing down their branches and beckoning to me: if you don’t take us, who will?

I can’t not. I can’t rest for thinking about all that goodness, fret about those berries darkening and dropping to the ground, all that waste.

I’m not alone in my obsession. “Thinking of raspberry foraging tonight,” M texted to me on Saturday. We cycled to the latest jackpot: a different friend’s massive garden, bordered on three sides by raspberry bushes, and she’s too busy to harvest them (Don't worry; I’m paying her back in frozen berries and jam). Like shooting fish in a barrel. Metaphorically, obviously — I would never shoot fish in a barrel.

We got talking over the fence to of the neighbour, who — obviously — happens to raise Monarch butterflies. He talked to us at length about milkweed and chrysalises (I just looked up “plural of chrysalis”) and showed us his monarchs in various stages of growth. I love that, all over this city, all over this world, people are passionate about, fantastically expert about, so many different, tiny things. “It’s like Christmas,” said M, after making arrangements with the butterfly man to come back in the fall and get some of the apples from the tree in front.

I eat plenty right off the bushes, freeze more to use later in smoothies and baking. I’ve mashed 12 cups’ worth of into a crimson, jewelled mess of pulp and seeds, and I may well mash another 6 cups worth before I’m done. In a few weeks, M will show me how to make jam. And we will pick windfall apples and make sauce and cider too, and I’m thinking about a late-summer raspberry tart — you know, in a flan pan, some kind of custard vanilla base, the very best berries on top. Like the proverbial cherry, marking the height of summer and easing our way to fall.

Root

Remember Zelda? Also known as that dresser I bought off kijiji for $50? The one I was going to refinish?

She’s dooooooooo-one!

LIKE OPRAH WOULD SAY IT

LIKE OPRAH WOULD SAY IT

Actually, she’s been done for a month and a half, after a five-day marathon of refinishing that was pretty much as intense as I imagined it would be. And at least as equally rewarding. She’s been ensconced in the newly painted bedroom for at least six weeks now, and I keep meaning to post about her, but somehow the effort of blogging about refinishing the dresser has seemed like so much more work than actually refinishing the dresser.

I think it’s because I had envisioned writing a “how to” post, wherein I would detail all the steps and tools and products that I used. But I don’t want to write a how-to post. There are plenty of lovely how-to posts out there already, including this one, which I used as a guideline. What I really want is to tell you how immensely satisfying and addictive it is to pour a thick layer of paint remover over a surface and then watch the layers of yellowed varnish bubble and curl and dissolve; that I could scrape that gunk off smooth wooden surfaces for days, getting down to base layers. And that I did scrape gunk off smooth wooden surfaces for days, listening to podcast after podcast, stripping off and replacing latex gloves, going over the entire surface — top, bottom, sides, legs, all nine drawers — twice with the remover and then again with steel wool and then again (and again) with the hand sander. And then the three layers of stain, the two of varnish, sandwiching in the coats between first thing in the morning and lasting at night, colonizing the deck and the dining room, fans acting as ventilation.

She’s not perfect, but of course she is.

This weekend, I am once more without kids, and, for a change, without a major project. Of course, I have half a dozen smaller projects on the go — I’m nearly finished a massive reorganization of the garden beds, foraging back-lane raspberries, revising that budget, All The Filing, editing a newsletter, figuring out the ending to that story, etc. There’s dirt under my fingernails. I made chicken stock last week, and then soup. I ate all the chard from the last-minute vegetable garden I planted in a fit of get these seeds in the ground and see what happens, and then I replanted the chard.

But after the initial flurry of activity involved in reclaiming this space, I think I'm starting to actually live in it, inhabiting it more than simply shaping it. I’m trying to remember how to slow down, forcing myself to sit quietly with a book or a newspaper or — more radical still — just my breath. Maybe that’s natural, the beginnings of the shift from summer to fall (yes, yes, I know it’s too early, but before you protest, I can already feel the chill in the evening air). But it’s something else, too, and it’s good.