Acrobatic Cats

I’m back writing the long project—a novel (!)—after taking a break^[1]. Writing that post last month…well, it opened a gentle but week-long weepy grief. I do not know, exactly, what I grieve…but the sorrow wants (needs?) to come out. Maybe this is why I write… to transform it into a container outside the boundaries of my skin so I don’t drown in it. To see it and know it and share it…and through sharing, an offering of deep connection.  

For many years I believed if I cried, I would never be able to stop. And I worried I’d need to be hospitalised^[2].  But my grief doesn’t operate like that. Instead, it seeps into my days and then one morning I wake and my eyelids snap open and my body feels lighter and my immediate thought is: I’m okay, I’m going to be okay. 

A thought: I climbed a lot of trees as a kid, and I fell out of them frequently. Unlike the lithe performance of falling cats, I always landed on my back with a thump that knocked the breath from my chest. Waking after episodes of weepy grief feels kinda similar. No bones broken, breath returning, ambient sounds roaring back to awareness, fingers and toes wiggling: I’m okay, I’m going to be okay. 

I tried—stubbornly, I know (!)— to force the writing through weeping and moping. Surprise! It clenched up, too concerned with itself. Roped and showy, a bow tied blowhard at a barbecue. Devoid of humour or light. Verbose, abstract, imprecise and rushing the scenes like a circus with a train to catch^[3]. 

So, I took a break. 

I took a week off to drive with Willa (daughter #2) and her partner Nadine to Halifax, Nova Scotia, helping their move there^[4]. I vowed to collect small beauties along the way. There were many; I’ll relay a few.  

One of the wonderful moments of the long two-day drive was arriving halfway, in Edmundston New Brunswick, as the sun was pooling the darkening horizon apricot with shots of violet and pinking the bellies of clouds.  Willa and I took turns driving her car, an ancient Hyundai replete with tattered remnants of some previous owner’s purple tinted windows and no air conditioning. We followed Nadine’s family who were towing a U-Haul trailer. All of Nadine’s family travelled to send Nadine off (and yes, this caused me pangs of envy tbh): dad, mom, grandfather (lolo in Tagalog), teen brother and Willa and Nadine’s pet cat, Sapho. He was a barn cat “rescued” from the farm and I’m pretty sure he knows how to play a banjo. He has stunted squirrel sized ears and copper eyeballs that can look in two directions at once. But that cat got game: demonic strength, steely resolve and the acrobatics of an anemone in a rip tide when anyone tries to put him in a travel box. Willa and Nadine walked around with shredded forearms, no biggie. Sapho spent the drive languishing on his spine between headrests on the back seat, oblivious and disinterested in any escape at gas stations. Why leave when you are so well loved?  I was glad to trade the cat (and his litter box) for no air conditioning. 

Anyway, back to arriving in Edmundston. Willa had driven the latest relay and, as we folded ourselves from our seats in the Days Inn parking lot, she greeted Lolo with a long phrase of Tagalog unspooling effortlessly from her lips. I was stunned! I didn’t know she was learning the language. Then Lolo replied and Nadine punched him, playfully, in the shoulder. Later it was explained to me that Willa had said, It’s a beautiful evening, and Lolo had replied, Yes, but not as beautiful as you are. 

Willa and Nadine’s apartment in Halifax that they had rented by touring it remotely and briefly through the cracked screens of their phones, was…recovering (I’m praying) from a recent cockroach infestation (the cockroaches had eaten the stove; a new one was set for delivery at some point later in the week). The lease was signed for a year and my close reading of the NS legislation (on the tiny screen of my own phone) confirmed there was no getting out of it. So, after a significant donation to Canadian Tire for cleaning and bug proofing supplies, we unloaded and performed a minor sanitization miracle over the ensuing days (and a new stove was delivered and the black moulded caulking lining the bathroom was replaced with new). 

Willa and I interspersed cleaning duty with sightseeing, taking in the beauty of the ocean and the beach and the sodium air. We toured the Art Gallery of Nova Scota and experienced the joy-imbued works of Maude Lewis. Her tiny house she shared with her husband has been moved to the gallery as a permanent exhibit. Peeking through the windows reveals the magic wonder she painted almost every surface of the cabin’s insides: stairs, walls, tables, chairs, shelves, doors…all covered in bright coloured flowers and animals and evidence of the living world around her, glowing and brimming with joy. Her husband painted too to help her keep up with the demands of patrons out of sync with creative process. I loved how he painted his eyelashes on his red cows…sweetly, gently, with care. 

Nadine asked what my favorite work in the gallery had been. My answer surprised me, but it was accurate. There is a massive Kent Monkman painting, Breaking Waves. But there are two smaller works exhibited alongside it, studies created as part of the process for the larger work. My favourite piece in the whole gallery was an 8×11 pencil sketch of the planned project which had as much handwriting on it as pictures. I could see the artist’s thought process in the pencil lines and the conceptual meanings toyed with. 

We ate clams from Malagash (north coast of NS) with chorizo coconut broth washed down with a Stillwell IPA. A transportive dish in the mouth, splashing tastebuds with flavours from across oceans.  

While away, I read N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn and fell swooning into his poetry rendered on every page but also his lines about the sacredness of language:

“My grandmother was a storyteller…she taught me how to live among her words, how to listen and delight…the simple act of listening is crucial to the concept of language, more crucial even than reading and writing…that old woman was asking me to come directly into the presence of her mind and spirit; she was taking hold of my imagination, giving me to share in the great fortune of her wonder and delight. She was asking me to go with her to the confrontation of something that was sacred and eternal. It was a timeless, timeless thing; nothing of her old age or of my childhood came between us.^[5]”

And Wendell Berry passed away. A line from one of his poems, The Wild Rose, became a kind of mantra for me for many years, reminding me each day that staying married was a choice^[6]. I came across Berry’s writings through his food and farming essays before I read his poetry. More interesting is this essay, written by Gracy Olmstead in Front Porch Republic, about Tanya Berry and a book of her photography capturing the practice of hog killing. 

This month, Lillian begins her “professional job” in Hogtown (Toronto); she has been with me on and off over the last few months trying to land one. When she stays with me, she exudes heavy exasperation, for, well, everything (it’s hard being twenty-five and living with your mom), but especially when swinging open the kitchen cupboards or staring into the fridge to complain, There’s nothing in here! What the hell do you eat, nuts and seeds?! I find this puzzling; my cupboards and fridge are stocked. I gather she means something prêt-à-porter. She’s an excellent cook but man oh man when she’s hungry? There’s no fuse shorter on a stick of dynamite. I used to toss almonds and bananas into the car’s backseat when I drove her home after elementary school, but my attempts to soothe the starving beast were lost to her roars. Dinner had to be on the table by 6 pm each evening…6:05 and the whole house crashed inwards, wails and arguments that always ended in tears. Mine mostly. She’s a kid (and an adult) who thrives on routine and I got her into competitive swimming very early on to blow the energy out of her. Can you tell I’m gearing up to write about her? She knows of course; she has an excellent sense of humour, though she has asked me to change her name AND ha ha my own.

As I thought about writing this little vignette, I was eating tomatoey Moroccan spiced chickpeas I’d made and warmed before adding minced mint and parsley harvested from my patio planters. I piled the chickpeas on top of raggedy bits of torn, well toasted, sourdough (I like the edges …well, burnt, ha (!), the crusty caramelization is delicious – I continue to make bread; it’s part of my staple diet), topped with two olive oil fried eggs (local, yolks sun coloured and runny), several grinds of black pepper and crumpled feta cheese. I have learned, after many years, Lillian’s exasperation and, ahem, constructive criticism, derives from a deep well of care and concern (she worries I don’t eat enough protein among other things). While eating my delicious lunch I enjoyed a terrific laugh reading Nick Cave’s latest Red Hand Files. 

My application to the Kingston Writer’s Fest advanced fiction workshop was accepted so I spent another week polishing up a short story I originally wrote…good gawd, over ten years ago?!  I’ve come back to it intermittently over the years and even workshopped it before with Rabih Alameddine^[7] and a terrifying literary-criticism crowd who behaved not unlike, come to think of it, Sapho’s dislike of the cat carrier. The story attempts to embody the idea (yeah, I know, first wrong move: starting with an idea) of food system interconnectedness and our complicit participation in a system that profits off violence and marginalization and really, slavery. You won’t be surprised the writing is devoid of humour and hauls in a hefty seasoning of bleak but very Canadian blasé, token nod to colonialism, lost in the barrens with whining winds, tumble weed and prairie grasses freezing over in a midnight blizzard je ne sais quoi^[8].  

Alemeddine’s feedback: “SoWhat?!”  He was yelling. “So what? We know this is bad and sad,” his tone turned simpering and mocking, “everyone knows, nobody cares. Why should we care? What do you want us to do about?” Us. Meaning readers.

I sat with his feedback, grasping strands of my hair and putting them back into place after the blow, and you know, I realized he was absolutely right (though, to be sure, weak on sensitivity and delivery). 

It took me many years to figure out that I need the protagonist in the story to be faced with a choice: system versus human. She chooses human but risks losing her nurse’s license. I have rewritten the story along these lines…it falls short…not false modesty, I know it’s not there yet.  So.  A good one to workshop. 

I have returned to writing the novel in progress. Knowing I am working through the most difficult sections of the story, I have started to write by hand with pencil in my notebook …a place where the writing feels les precious and I am more intimately connected with my hands.  Interestingly, transcribing from there to the computer expands the writing, e.g., two short, penciled paragraphs became six paragraphs and an exchange of dialogue that is 1400 words in digital format.  I’m trying to quell the scream about this story getting too long. Too long for what? She scoffed. It’s fun!  

Okay…I’ll leave it there. So many small beauties in any day to catch us falling so we twist amidst the firmament, almost dancing, to land, lightly, on our feet. 

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^[1] I read somewhere (Substack? It seems lost to the mists…) that one ought to claim—emphatically—that one’s project is writing a novel.  So, closing in on 50, 000 words drafted, yes, I am writing a novel. (current count: 49, 881). An aside: a friend suggested this blog is my “long project”. Perhaps it is. 

^[2] My thoughts on this may seem overly dramatic, but my father experienced what was termed “a psychotic break” in 2003; he was hospitalised for six months. I intend to write about the experience in the novel…the episode, and the years following. In that strange movement of unexpected reversals, it enabled he and I to establish a relationship of respect and a kind of love we had never shared previously. He softened and I opened myself to it. But I sense (and worry), perhaps not directly through a genetic disposition…more a suggestion of having been witness to his “break”…how close the line is between this reality and the perception of another, how easily it may be crossed, by which I mean, how easily I might cross over myself.  Grief feels precipitously close…so I have learned to give grief respect and time and space. I know writing this so plainly (as well as last month’s post) is not always received well by readers. Though my porcelain-thin transparency may give the impression I’m broken or easily shattered, rest assured, my will is wrought of iron. It’s just, I have to remind myself sometimes. Writing and posting my thoughts here proves it to myself, and if you are still reading, I’m grateful. You too, are courageous.  

^[3] Good gawd, I’m on a manic upswing, I mean, just look at the number of images crammed into that little paragraph!

^[4] Nadine transferred from OCAD to NSCAD; Willa is working at a coffee shop at Lawrencetown Beach 

^[5] These are lines taken from pages 83 and 84 of the fiftieth anniversary edition, HarperPerrenial Modern Classics, 2018. There is a longer passage reflecting on “the white man’s world” of language …how it “has diluted and multiplied” and how we have become insensitive “for the Word itself—as an instrument of creation”. And he goes on to explain the beauty of his thinking “words were medicine; they were magic and invisible. They came from nothing into sound and meaning. They were beyond price; they could neither be bought nor sold. And she never threw her words away.”  Amen.

^[6] I know this was not Berry’s intention in his poem, nevertheless, this is how I chose to interpret it. It’s the final lines of the poem I repeated frequently in my own mind: choosing again what I chose before. I’m not kidding, every morning for a few years, I repeated this line to myself. I explained it to my then husband too but he focused on the words and missed the meaning. 

^[7] You gotta hit that link!   I might have skipped the workshop if I’d seen the pic. Or at least had a better idea of what I was signing up for.  

^[8] That, my non-literary friends (and yes, I’m looking down from upon my high horse) is a perfect example of what we call hyperbole. High per be olé! And for my literary friends, ignore the grammatical stretching.