mine

scuff on the side of the rental car

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.

Lady of Shallot David Austin English Rose

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.

The back garden shot towards the house, with a scarf on the clothes line

 

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.

Eglantine (briar rose)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 Irisapple 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 lobeliafrom 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!)

Bee gathering pollen from a Rosa Rugosa RubraIt’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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This flying magpielogo is used on all of Helena Frei's websites

that depends a good deal on where you want to get to

Tenniel illustration of Cheshire Cat from Alice Through the Looking Glass - flipped to face right.30,000 years or so ago the proportion of people who lived long enough to be grandparents skyrocketed – which may have been the driving force behind the explosion of new tool types and art forms that occurred at the same time, and may explain how modern humans outcompeted other hominids such as the Neanderthals.

Right now we’re experiencing just such another jump in life expectancy.

Judging from what happened from the last time humanity experienced such a jump, the life of our species may change radically. And this time we have the opportunity to direct that change.

So what are we going to do with it? Where do we want to get to?

(The title of this post is the Cheshire cat’s answer to Alice’s question)

This flying magpielogo is used on all of Helena Frei's websites

would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?

Tenniel illustration of Cheshire Cat from Alice Through the Looking GlassMost of the people who have reached the age of 65 are alive now. That was the text of the bank ad on the mall wall that accosted me when I came out of the subway. A startling statistic, but apparently true.

in 1881, when  Otto von Bismarck set the retirement age at 70, life expectancy in Europe and North America was in the low 60s – statistically few people were expected to survive to retire, even when retirement age was eventually lowered to 65.

Now it’s very different – in the western world life expectancy hovers around 80.

What to do with all those years?

(The title of this post is Alice’s question to the Cheshire cat in “Through the Looking Glass”)