NOT singing in the rain

Not owning a car makes a lot of sense when living in downtown Toronto, but it does make for the occasional Very Interesting day. Yesterday was one of those. I had a car booked from 7:30am to 5pm, for a long list of errands, and it was raining. Variably – from unenthusiastic drizzle to the kind of downpour that soaks you to the skin in seconds. With occasional thunder & lightning accompaniment.

The first challenge was folding the back seats down for cargo. The car was one I’d never driven before, and the seat-folding design was, um, opaque. I peered, poked, prodded, pulled, and even looked in the trunk. The seats stayed up.

Finally, I resorted to reading the manual. I had been right to look in the trunk – but I’d missed the demure little levers tucked in in the corners.

The car pretty much made up for those shy levers with a heated steering wheel, a very enthusiastic bumwarmer, and a cup holder that actually fit my travel mug!

Then there was that bit of drama when I came out of Staples. The parking lot was nearly empty, and I’d parked the car in an empty row, all by its little grey self. And had a nasty shock when I came out and saw a big white scuff on the driver’s door. Looked like it had been doored! In an empty parking lot! Why the #$**!# would anyone park close enough to not leave room to open their door without hitting mine?

Checking it, I found a subtle 2cm square transparent sticker printed with a sad face and the words “damage reported” in a dark green that was almost invisible against the dark grey of the car. When I picked the car up, it was raining hard, and I figure that the scuff marks had faded when wet. The rain had apparently let up long enough for them to dry & come out of hiding.

That sticker was a huge relief! Reporting any damage, no matter how minor, is a royal pain and a time sink.

The rest of the day was a lot of driving, parking and dodging in & out of stores in various shades of wet.

Unloading at home was interesting – when I arrived there was NO parking available anywhere near, and, oddly enough, it was raining again. So, I pulled in across the street, illegally partly on the sidewalk, put on the four way flashers, and trotted back and forth from car to vestibule.

Three quarters of the way through the process, the skies opened, and it rained so hard that I was drenched in just one trip across the street. Then someone got in the car that was parked in front of my house and drove off. I GRABBED the parking space!

Another huge relief! I finished unloading and didn’t have to try to find parking so that I could go in, put the freezer & fridge shopping away and put on a dry jacket & scarf before returning the car. It’s a fifteen-minute walk back from the car’s official parking spot, and, even if I risked leaving the fridge&freezer stuff out, I didn’t want to make that walk wearing a cold & soggy scarf and jacket.

And the final minor drama of the day: when I got to the official parking spot, somebody had parked their huge SUV half-way into the space, despite the very clear signage that it’s a car share parking spot only. If I parked in the available half, the tail of my car would have blocked in the car on the parking pad next to it.

Le sigh. The procedure when this happens is to phone the car share office, give them the number of the offending vehicle, then find another parking spot and phone that in.

The office had picked up, and we’d started the process, when the driver & passengers of the SUV scurried up (it was, of course, raining), and drove off. Another huge relief!

Walked home, changed, and had tea. Putting the rest of the stuff away could wait til tomorrow.

Ballet in (very) full colour

Watch for the little old ladies!

Barbra Streisand

An antidote for a depressing election

The morning after the PC voting binge that promises to give us a monumental social and economic hangover, I had a severe attack of doom and gloom.

Living in Toronto’s Kensington Market, where affordable housing, homelessness, and poverty are daily concerns for many of my neighbours, it would have been easy to think myself into an angry, depressed funk. Not good, and pointless; wouldn’t have helped anyone.

Sitting in the garden drinking my coffee and poking around the web looking for something positive to latch on to, I realized that the positive was right in front of me: the garden itself.

It’s messy, disorganized, riddled with weeds – but it’s beautiful, and it’s one of the touchstones of my life.

It’s a sort of accidental garden; fourteen years ago, when I took it over, it was a tangled mat of thorny Chinese bittersweet backed by a thicket of Japanese knotweed and dotted with patches of belladonna, miscellaneous aggressive weeds, scraggly bluebells, clumps of garlic chives. and something that looked like a relative of buckwheat with half-meter deep roots.

It had obviously been somebody’s much-loved, probably vegetable, garden at some point, but it had been neglected and used as a random dump for years. Every shovelful of soil turned up broken glass, plastic shards, metal scraps, bits of bone, mussel shells, pieces of construction waste and other rubbish.

Trash aside, I lucked out – under the topsoil, there’s clay. I love roses; I wanted a rose garden, and it turns out that roses love clay.

As I reclaimed patches of soil from the resident weeds & waste, the first things I planted were roses. For the first ten years, I planted a few more each year until now, I’ve got a couple of dozen kinds of roses. Some of them, more than one bush – the antique roses like the eglantine and the apothecary rose are actually invasive – slower than mint, but just as determined. If I let them, they’d take over!

The early summer roses, like Lady of Shallot at the top of the post, the pink & white eglantine at the right (which was a favourite of Queen Elizabeth the First) and the Rosa Rugosa Rubra at the bottom of the post are flowering now. I’ve got lots more roses to look forward to this year – a couple even continue blooming into December!

Eventually, as I cleaned up, I planted lots of other things among the roses – peonies, an apple tree, the tiny potted Mongolian lilac that was a survivor from a previous patio garden, a juniper, rhubarb, bulbs, herbs, poppies, carnations, raspberries, clematis, strawberries, vinca, bee balm, columbine, a fern. I don’t remember everything that’s there now; it wasn’t really planned. Sort of a magpie garden, and the bees love it.

Some plants I bought, some I grew from seed, some were gifts from neighbours & friends. Most survived and thrived, some died, some are trying to take over. Some, I have to baby along. Some, I have to discourage. An occasional one I’m trying to eradicate.

(Don’t plant soapwort or feverfew outside a container – they’re pushier than mint!)

It’s a work in progress, a living organism. Sitting watching the bees work in the ten-foot-tall Rosa Rugosa Rubra that was one of the first things I planted here is an antidote for the depressing election results.

In its various incarnations, the garden’s been here for 143 years, and odds are good that it will last longer than the Doug Ford government. Or even Doug Ford.

Older ladies…

…’nuff said!

Have I mentioned that I despise raccoons?

My experiences with raccoons haven’t been positive – they’ve nested under the deck and clawed at my feet through the gaps between the boards, defecated on the roof, torn up the garden – repeatedly – and often woken me up disporting themselves under my bedroom window, but the latest outrage is the worst.

Sometime over the summer they pried open a corner of the door to the shed where I store spare chairs, a silk-painting frame and odds & ends of building materials for making running repairs to the house.

They pried it open and moved in.

Unfortunately, I didn’t notice until a couple of weeks ago – the door is behind the apple tree and a composter. The top of the door looks fine, and I didn’t happen to need any of the stuff in the shed over the summer.

It was a horrible mess! Muddy paw marks and heavy dirt smudges all over, many dried dribble marks (the roof does not leak), and a deposit that appeared to be from a raccoon with intestinal problems. And to make the mess even worse, they had clawed up the offcuts of styrofoam insulation that I used to keep the furniture from wicking moisture from the floor – styrofoam crumbs all over everything.

Cleaning up after raccoons can be dangerous – aside from rabies they also carry raccoon roundworm and leptospirosis, both of which can be fatal. So it was on with the disposable Tyvek overalls, gloves and respirator with dust filters. And Javex – lots of Javex to wash the items that are worth keeping and swab down the area I’ve been working on.

Finding a day that’s free, sunny and reasonably warm has been a challenge – this has been a busy and chilly autumn. So far I’ve been able to spend two afternoons cleaning up and have at least one more to go before spring.

Once the shed is empty, I’ll swab it down with Javex solution and seal it up until spring. When the weather is warm enough to paint outdoors, I’ll paint all the surfaces with a stain sealer.

And repair the door so I don’t have to screw it shut to keep the raccoons out,

Grumble.

So what to do?

The obvious options – like helping with grandchildren, travel, volunteering, gardening, a hobby – just don’t grab me.

My kids are great and my grandchildren are delightful but, much as I love them and enjoy their company, turning them into a full-time occupation is a creepy idea.

Traveling for the sake of traveling doesn’t appeal – the thought of going on a cruise gives me the willies.

I’ve volunteered – and still volunteer – and meet some great people, but no matter how worthy the cause or useful the work, it leaves me wanting more.

My garden is a pleasure and a refuge, but it’s not a life.

And I’m not sure I get the idea of hobby. If you google the definition of “hobby” you get words like “diversion”, “distraction”, “sideline”. In other words a pastime – something to fill in time.

Which sums up the problem. To this active, healthy little old lady the usual activities deemed suitable for little old ladies sound like filling in useless time, waiting for death.

Um. No. No thanks. That doesn’t suit me; I want something more positive, more creative, more satisfying, more active. Something I can get a kick out of, the sense of a job well done, a life well lived!

The world is changing…

Last Sunday I made my farewell pilgrimage to the World’s Biggest Bookstore.

For thirty-three years it’s been a source of information, inspiration and entertainment, and occasionally a refuge. Probably half the books that infest my house came from there.

It wasn’t just somewhere to find reading material, it was a handy place to meet, a useful place to spend those odd bits of time when I was downtown with a gap in my schedule – or simply a good place to browse and relax. Low-key, predictable, reliable and a permanent feature of my personal urban landscape.

Only now it’s closing.

I’m not surprised – rumors have been circulating for years. A low-rise box with a big footprint is an obvious target in Toronto’s skyrocketing real estate market.

But I am surprised by how bereft I feel. My life has been punctuated by bookstores and the World’s Biggest was a favourite. Mildly scruffy, with long hours, a reasonably clean washroom, no pressure to buy, and staffed by helpful people who didn’t mind if I took piles of books over to a staircase and sat down to browse.

I know change is inevitable, but when something that was a good part of my life disappears I’m saddened – an old friend I took for granted is gone.

In case you’re wondering what the receipt is for, I bought a gardening magazine with an article on hardy clematis and two books on Italian cooking.

…which reminds me – the Cookbook Store also closed this month.

The kindness of strangers

Unlike Blanche DuBois, I don’t depend on it, but the kindness of strangers sometimes surprises and reassures me.

This morning I slogged through much snow – both falling and fallen – to the hardware store for a 20 kilo bag of anti-slip stuff.

By the time I got there I was covered with snow and stopped outside the doors to brush some of it off so that it wouldn’t melt and drip once I got into the nice, warm store. I shook the snow off my hat and started to brush it off the rest of me with my mitt.

Then a total stranger gently took the mitt out of my hand, brushed the snow off my back, handed the mitt back and went on her way.

Hair

In April 2005 my hairdresser pissed me off royally. I won’t go into details, but let’s just say I was left with an expensive mess.

In that eye-rolling moment of “oh, crap, I have to find a new hairdresser” I had one of those rare flashes of insight that actually make a difference to how my life goes. It went something like “hey, wait a minute…I hate going to hairdressers…”!

So I stopped going to hairdressers and let my hair grow!

It’s been nearly nine years and my hair is long enough now to brush the chair when I sit. Not quite long enough to sit on, but it still seems to be growing, so it may still get there. Sometimes I wear it in a bun or in a single braid down my back; most of the time I wear it in two braids.

My latest hair project is to learn how to sew it crown-fashion like Lucia, Minerva and Europa Anguissola playing chess in this 1555 painting by their sister, Renaissance painter Sofonisba Anguissola (who lived to be a little old lady of 93).

redefining little old lady

figuring out this "senior" thing