A Dark and Stormy Night
Well, dear reader, here we are again, back at the beginning to start our journey into our second novel, The Thirteen Problems! And what good timing it’s all worked out to be! Miss Marple’s cozy collection of short stories just about cries out to be read on a chilly autumn night, with you safely ensconced in your comfiest grandfather chair, a mug of cocoa or a tiny glass of cherry brandy at the ready, and your eager guests’ faces illuminated by a roaring fire and shivering candles. Let the wind wuther and the rain pelt; let storms howl and shutters slam - you are warm and safe in your parlour or drawing room, and facing a more formidable foe in the pages of this book than any storm could pose: murder most foul!
It might feel strange to begin something new in autumn, which is so obviously the winding down of the year in many ways - the trees are shedding their green coats for vibrant gossamer gowns of orange and red and gold; the splendour of gardens is fading to mere memory. And yet, this is also the beginning of apple season and the yearly spate of baking; the beginning of school term; the air whispers of winter’s coming, bringing holidays and icy, wind-pinked cheeks along with it. I know that Yuletide is on its way, if for no other reason than my mother has begun her annual Christmas cake - a sure sign that autumn is reaching its peak, and that the crisp tang in the air is a herald of chillier winds to come. It’s the beginning of the end, the beginning of the death of the year - a terrible, frosted death, and yet beautiful and not without its pleasures.
This season of The Reader’s Museum will hold its own array of delights, dear reader: not only the clever crimes detailed within the pages of our novel, but also a whole host of objects, practices, customs, histories, and experiences. The short stories of this collection fairly teem with objects to consider - in some cases, it was hard to choose just which ones to examine, and which ones to take up as Didactic Panels! But perhaps that is par for the course: this is, after all, a collection of crime, so of course the pages are littered with clues. I have reiterated this fact in today’s episode, but I will take another opportunity to remind you of the inherent spoilers that will inevitably occur throughout this series. So, if you have not yet read The Thirteen Problems, I beseech you to go to and do so immediately! I’ll meet you at the Reader’s Museum when you have finished - as always, the doors are open, admission is free, and Miss Marple awaits us! Onward!
Jennifer
That’s a Wrap!
Phew! Dear reader, we have made it to the end of our first book and first series, on our maiden voyage through the Reader’s Museum! Hurrah! We’ve journeyed through the highs and lows of Anne’s new life in Avonlea: books, bosom friends, birch trees, and blunders! And we’ve been joined by scholars and specialists who’ve enriched our discussions and enlivened this book anew.
When I began the Reader’s Museum, I hoped most of all to recreate the kinds of satisfying, rich, varied, and close conversations I had with friends during school, and, to my delight, that dream has come true! As we bring this series to a close and prepare for the next one’s beginning, it’s tempting to focus solely on the next horizon, the next project, the next series - and, to be fair, those futures are exciting and full of the kinds of ambitions and challenges and triumphs that call out to Anne by the end of this novel. However, I think there is something good and valuable in pausing to celebrate achievements and milestones, both big and small. I had an absolute blast recording the wrap party episode with Emma and Kennis, and I hope you enjoy listening to it, dear reader! And after tomorrow’s episode is launched, I’ll be taking myself off for a forest bath in a nearby small town - an especially effective one because the leaves are turning and the sky is a painful, never-ending blue, and the air is spicy with the tang of autumn. What better forest bath could one ask for?
We are moving on to other books and other objects in the coming series, for which I am fidgeting with excitement, but I know I’ll be coming back to this first foray through the Reader’s Museum, to re-encounter the objects and practices and peculiarities we’ve met so far. And, similarly, Anne will always be there for us - waiting in the pages of this novel, ready to accompany us in all moments of life. I suspect that she may be walking a little way behind me in the woods tomorrow afternoon, delighting in the rich and final finery of the trees. And I think that tomorrow, perhaps more than ever, I will be of one mind with our beloved heroine: very glad to live in a world where there are Octobers!
Jennifer
A Walk in the Woods
The Japanese have a concept called ‘shirin-yoku’ or ‘forest bathing’, a practice of immersing your senses in a forest atmosphere (usually by going for a walk in the woods) to promote health and well-being. Taking a forest bath definitely helps to cleanse a person of the grime and grumpiness of the city. There are a few forests that fit the bill within a short drive from my home, so come along with me. The drive will give you a sense of what is about to occur. When we begin, brick and concrete and steel and glass will whiz by your window. But slowly, you’ll notice that buildings and cars are replaced with fields and stands of trees, and the traffic will subside. The colour of the world will seem to shift from grey and black to a kaleidoscope of green, inviting and soothing, and your eyes will feel less tired already.
When you step out of the car, we’ll still be in the parking lot, so there will still be the noise of cars, the smell of asphalt, the humourless painted yellow lines that keep everything in check. There may be a few people around, some with dogs, some with children. But as we make our way down the smaller of the two trails, the one that traces the edge of a lake and skirts the boundary of the forest, you’ll find a sort of calm settle over you like a blanket. The air will be scented with pine and poplar, and in the company of stately trunks and fallen stumps, you’ll start to feel right-sized: not too big, and not too small. You might notice your shoulders relax, and your breathing slow as we move deeper into the woods, where the trees and their canopies cast shadows, but don’t worry - it won’t feel frightening. That lowered light is a kind of respite from the glare and heat of the sun, or a protective barrier that slows the wind as it passes through, turning it into a gentle, teasing breeze.
The forest floor is kind. The earth beneath your feet is soft and spongy, made even more forgiving by the blanket of drying pine needles and carpets of moss. You’ll find that your pace will slow as you take in the shades and tints around you: genteel greens, deep rust, and loamy black, aging to brown. The woods are alive, with light and colour and the music of a forest - birds and insects, trilling their daily tunes, the crackle of twigs underfoot, the rustle and shiver of leaves dancing in the wind. And yet you’ll find yourself growing still, quiet. We won’t need to talk at all to know the woods are working their magic.
The trail is a long one - it loops around the lake, and then jogs back on itself a ways, until we arrive back where we started. On the surface, it might seem that we’ve gone in circles, going nowhere in a big hurry - but that’s not true at all, is it? We’ve gone somewhere peaceful, restorative, invigorating and gentle, and we haven’t hurried a single moment of it. We’ve had our forest bath and come out clean, refreshed, clear-eyed on the other side. You’ll come with me again, won’t you?
Jennifer
Marlowe
When I began my PhD, the world felt very uncertain. I was living away from home, away from my partner, most of my friends had moved from our tiny college town. It was 2016, and, I thought, things could not get much worse (the height of hubris in retrospect, I know.) I was feeling distinctly unmoored. So, in a fit of foolishness, the kind of thing that happens when you have grown up money but a child’s brain, I went to a local animal sanctuary with the great and good Kennis Forte, and brought home an eighty-dollar dog. He was, I was told, eight years old and beagle-ish: he had the requisite floppy ears, the white-dipped tail, the ever-unsatisfied nose. His proportions were wrong, though. He had a too-long body and a too-small head, and feet that did not fit his stubby legs. I called him Little Big Foot for a while as a result. I named him for Phillip Marlowe, the main character from The Big Sleep, because surely every hound ought to be a detective, sniffing out clues.
At first, we did not get along. He was, at best, ambivalent about me, caring only for his walks and inspecting every single individual blade of grass he encountered. He peed on my floors, nearly every day, for about six months. I spent a fortune in vet bills trying to figure out what was wrong. After that agonizing six months, the vet finally figured it out, and Marlowe became a much happier dog very suddenly. Who could blame him? You don’t feel like making friends when you’re sick. Now he would follow me around the apartment, and deigned to sleep in the dog bed I provided, next to my bed, instead of on the floor in the living room. A typical old man, he snored like a freight train.
Our walks became joyful. Still slow and painstaking, but pleasant. He learned to sit, not to bay at 7 am, to come when called (mostly), and walked like a gentleman on his leash. He also learned that the local video rental store had dog biscuits behind the counter, and so whenever we took a right turn out the front door and began to make our way down to the lake, heading in the direction of said store, his pace would increase significantly, ears swaying, ignoring sights and smells. He was a dog on a mission. The walk home was a different story: now tired, having had his treat and faced with a walk that was entirely uphill, he dragged his paws and stopped to sniff literally anything. The walk home could be twice as long as the walk down.
He took the move to Quebec with us like a champ, evidently delighted by all the new smells and adapting better than I did to a new city. He made friends with the dog across the hall, and as he grew older, he enjoyed trips to the park in a wagon, sitting like a pharaoh on his blanket, his head tilted to smell the air, a regal expression of disdain and ambivalence at the people who exclaimed over him.
He died here. It was hardly a surprise: he was old, had been old when I got him, and for as long as I had known him, he’d had trouble with his kidneys, his pancreas, his spleen, with arthritis in his shoulders. His once rusty head had gone snowy-white: I called him sugar-faced, trying to push away the dread that filled my stomach when people commented on his age. We were told what to look for and when to go to the vet. Just as spring was ripening into summer, my husband woke me in the night, voice urgent and low. It was time.
We were very lucky. It didn’t feel like that at the time. It felt like I would never be happy again, like I would never stop crying. But the vets were kind, and we were able to bring him home to spend time with him and say goodbye. It took me months to sleep normally again, without the sound of his snoring.
That was three years ago now. We still don’t have another dog. Sometimes I see a lady in our neighbourhood walking her cheerful little beagle, barely out of puppyhood, and a horrible part of me wants to warn her: that this dog, this sweet little dog whom she loves so much, will die and break her heart. That, like Stuart McLean says,
“We do this thing. We open our hearts to the world around us. And the more we do that, the more we allow ourselves to love, the more we are bound to find ourselves one day…standing in the kitchen of our lives, surrounded by the ones we love, and feeling empty, and alone, and sad, and lost for words, because one of our loved ones, who should be there, is missing. Mother or father, brother or sister, wife or husband, or a dog or cat. It doesn't really matter. After a while, each death feels like all the deaths, and you stand there like everyone else has stood there before you, while the big wind of sadness blows around and through you.”
Marlowe was a great dog and a better friend. He cost me eighty dollars and utter heartbreak. I’d pay it all again in a moment.
Jennifer
The Future is Female
I have lived a life that is dominated by women in many ways. Art history is largely female in my experience, and out of a department of about sixty people, there were two, maybe three men - the tiny minority, by a wide margin. I went to an all-girls’ high school, where male teachers were rare, and any jobs that needed doing (sports teams, science fairs, provincial exams, the yearly musical, art shows, fundraising, Spirit Week, holiday parties and concerts, volunteering, letter-writing campaigns, you name it) were planned, organised, populated, advertised, and carried out by women and girls. Math and science were not ‘male’ subjects: all the classes everyone took were, of course, counted as ‘girly’ subjects because we were girls, and we were taking them, so… you know.
People sometimes assume that girls, when grouped together, become catty and aggressive with each other. I don’t remember that being the defining feature of my social life at school at all. Instead, I recall a kind of shedding - not a pleasant image, but suitable, I think - a shedding of the expectation, the demand, to be pretty. It’s a rent that women are expected to pay for the privilege to exist in public, but for at least five days a week for six years of my life, that rent was forgiven. In seventh grade, the earliest a girl could start at this school, we earnestly tried to do our hair and look cute in our terrible uniforms, and eigth grade inevitably brough on a wave of kilt rolling to ensure the shortest possible skirt (and a roll of fabric around one’s middle), but from then on, there was a distinct drop off in fussing over looks. Perfectly coiffed waves? Absolutely not - we opted for ponytails, braids, or broccoli-shaped buns twisted at the very top of the head, caring little for loose strands - anything to keep your hair out of your face. We also generally ditched daily makeup of any kind - mostly, the logic seemed to be that an extra few minutes of sleep each morning was vastly more valuable than a face full of foundation. At a certain point, we all seemed to accept that there was no way to look cute in the uniform, so we gave that up, too. A girl in a knee- or calf-length skirt was either in seventh grade, because her kilt was new and not yet hemmed, or in twelfth grade, because she wasn’t trying to show off her legs anymore, and didn’t care.
Instead of hyperfocusing on looks, I remember an air of earnestness. It was generally a good thing to be at the top of the class, and my classmates became invested in school projects, classroom discussions, and studying for tough exams. Participation was cool - or, perhaps more accurately, participation was fun, and we didn’t care so much about being cool. We wept openly when we watched Little Women in class, and there was no retaliation, no teasing, no shame in it. Now, it wasn’t a utopia: did every girl get along with every other girl? No, of course not. Was everyone good at everything? Obviously not. A good friend of mine was a ferocious volleyball player, and I was terrible at sports and gym class. But there wasn’t a feeling that somehow her upcoming match was more or less exciting than my weekly choir practice - especially considering she was in choir with me. The clique-y, rigid expectations for teens that tend to show up in John Hughes movies just didn’t seem that important in my experience.
I put that down to the lack of boys. There was no one to impress, so we got on with other stuff that seemed a lot more important - like what class costume we could come up with for Halloween, or how to get away with wearing sweatpants under our skirts without detention. As we learned in this week’s episode, yes, single-sex education was developed out of a biological misapprehension about women’s bodies, but the outcomes were great, at least for me. There are apparently studies that show that single-sex education is wonderful for girls, but terrible for boys, and the reason seems to be that when left without their usual targets (women), boys turn on each other. The reaction from some quarters to this news is that we ought not to have single-sex education, to protect boys and young men from violence and bullying, so that women can assume that burden, keeping the boys safe? Cool. I’m more inclined to wonder if we shouldn’t convince boys to stop targeting anyone at all, but hey, what do I know? All I can tell you is that I have enjoyed a distinctly female life, learning, working, studying, and growing alongside women who are funny, ferocious, smart, driven, kind, empathetic, loving, and more.
Jennifer
All Grown Up
I don’t know about you, dear listener, but one of the major parts of my shift from childhood to adulthood was makeup. As a little kid, I loathed face paint with the fire of a thousand suns. It dried tight and itchy on my skin, which I could not bear. I was the only child at the Christmas concert who happily wore the little paper antlers but rejected the red thumbprint of face paint on my nose to complete my Rudolph costume for our performance of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” I maintain that the show was not drastically altered by my bare, paint-free face, and really, there is only one Rudolph - a whole chorus of tiny four-year-old Rudolphs would have made for quite a different song.
This approach to makeup changed as the products improved and I got older. As a ten-year-old, I had one strawberry and one root beer scented lip balm, with little keychains attached to the lids so I could dangle them from my knapsack every day at school. The strawberry one added no colour at all to a person’s face, but the root beer one was dark, and very slightly tinted your mouth. The result was probably more “I just ate a popsicle” than “sophisticated wash of lip colour”, but my ten-year-old self was satisfied by the product at the time. I’m not sure they actually did anything to address dry lips, but they smelled so good, and all the other little girls in my grade had one, too. It felt nice to be included and compare notes about our favourite scents, and admit to one another that we were often tempted to eat them because of their delicious and startlingly realistic scents.
I was in dance classes as a kid, too, and that was where I had my first introduction to actual makeup - although, of course, stage makeup is quite different (thank goodness) to the sort of stuff you’d wear on a normal day. This look comprised thick, pancake foundation, quite a bit too orange for my skin, paired with ferocious red lipstick, slashes of vibrant rouge, extending into my hairline, and worst of all, black eyeline and mascara - which, because I was young, was usually applied by someone’s mother, who held my forehead in a vice grip and normally stabbed me in the eye with the kohl. Not a pleasant experience. Even more difficult was getting all the gunk off after the fact. Stage makeup is like concrete - thick, flamboyant concrete. I miss dancing, but I do not miss the makeup.
I dabbled in a more manageable look as a teenager, but never really developed a consistent habit of wearing it. For school dances, I started wearing sparkly eyeshadow, frosted lip gloss, and aggressively applied winged eyeliner (the early 2000s were a challenging time). I read magazines with my friends, poring over pictures and how-to guides in those heady, distant days before the internet and video platforms filled with cheerful makeup tutorials, demanding that girls use about sixty products to achieve an acceptable face (each one accompanied by a heart-stopping price tag, too). I did not have dozens of makeup brushes or loads of products. Instead, I got my glittery eyeshadow from the drugstore and applied it with my fingers or one of those horribly useless little triangles of foam glued to a plastic stick, which came along with the makeup. The results were awkward and amateur, but then again, just about everyone I knew was working with the same tools, so we all looked roughly the same level of bizarre. There were some strange products and trends, typical of their time, which I am delighted to have left behind: putting foundation or concealer on your lips, for instance, which resulted in a sort of ‘kissed by correction fluid’ look, or the insistence that any inch of visible skin be covered in shimmer.
I will say that my heart aches a little for girls today. I would have dissolved, I’m sure, in the face of the pressure to live up to social media models and YouTube tutorials, demanding that young teens do their best to look airbrushed and colour-corrected and flawless all the time. My makeup was bad, but maybe that was good? Maybe it was okay that, as a literal child, I hadn’t perfected the accoutrements of adulthood? I’m sure the generation before me probably had similar thoughts about new products and changes to making up when I was a teenager. I’m sort of both grateful that mousse-textured foundation and eyeliner pencils you lit with a lighter to melt the wax are behind us. On the other hand, that time of life was exciting: we were in a big hurry to grow up and thrive, and makeup seemed like one of the ways to do that. But you know what they say, nostalgia’s not what it used to be. And, thankfully, neither is the makeup.
Jennifer
Telephone
As I sit at my desk, setting about to write today’s blog, I can feel the weight of my cell phone in my pocket. Where do any of us go without our phones these days? But they’ve obviously become more than just the simple devices that let us talk to our long-distance relatives or best friends or mothers or the bank. Now they’re entertainment, miniature computers, games, cameras, televisions, radios, GPS devices, watches, calculators, and perhaps worst of all, distractions, all rolled into one. I routinely find myself scrolling, or worse, doom-scrolling these days, trying to numb out the negative feelings that seem to crowd around me, face illuminated by the blue light of my screen, waiting for me to grow tired of swiping through content on a never-ending dopamine dive, waiting for me to put the phone down so they can come crashing back in again. Like the nightlight in my bathroom keeps away Gary Oldman Dracula, who lives in my shower, my little phone keeps away the goblins that live in my brain. At least, for a little while.
But other goblins come out to play whenever my phone is in my hand. Boredom, exhaustion, dry eyes and bad posture, and a rollercoaster of anticipation: the joy doesn’t come from watching that cute cat video or reading that insightful poem: it comes as we swipe our thumbs up the screen, eager for the next thing, the next piece of ‘content’ (hateful word), hoping against hope that the next one will be the one to make us feel better. And then the next one. And the next one. And the next one. Somehow hours can pass by, and eventually this rollercoaster flatlines. If I’m perfectly honest with myself, the phone doesn’t make the bad feelings go away and leave space for good ones. It numbs everything, a sort of mental Lidocaine, turning down the volume on the noise and chatter in my mind.
And yet to put down this little hunk of plastic and metal feels nigh-on impossible. To give up a cell phone now seems like the same commitment an anchoress of old would make. Medieval women, ususally nuns or sisters, would offer to be walled up in a church or cathedral, sometimes an abbey, sort of a very intense version of hermitage, living out the remainder of their days with no contact, no interaction with the outside world -nothing. Usually, they would go quite mad and have visions of Christ and write metaphysical poetry. Without my phone, I couldn’t call my parents, or speak regularly with my friends, or get around my city easily, or know what the weather would be, or check my email, or listen to podcasts, or - and perhaps most pressingly - numb out the terrible feelings that sometimes follow me around. To be all alone with myself and my own thoughts, bricked up in a wall somewhere, sounds like a sort of torture. And yet an anchoress chose her fate willingly. Maybe I ought to put the phone down and walk away - perhaps poetry and visions of salvation wait for me on the other side of scrolling. Maybe that’s where enlightenment and fulfillment lie.
Ah, my phone has buzzed. I should really check my email. And a few minutes scrolling never hurt anyone…
Jennifer
The Seaside
I am, at my heart, a Prairie girl - moutains are all very well in post cards, but in reality I find any sort of incline the cause of a spoiled landscape. So disorganised, so irregular. Driving in the mountains is hazardous, and walking uphill is uncomfortable. I know it’s an insupportable opinion to hold, but I cleave to it still - the earth may not be flat, but I sure do like a flat horizon and a BIG sky, one that comes in startling colours (minty green before a storm, painfully deep blue in the height of summer, jewel-toned and glowing at sunset, pale gold in the morning, velvety black and dotted with diamonds at midnight, periwinkle when it rains - increasingly, hazy orange when fires rage in the north).
But I will admit that this certainty was challenged when I first saw the Atlantic in person. I was standing on the pier at Dún Laoghaire, having gone past the pebble beach and the ornate pergola, right to the very farthest outreach of the pier’s stretched arm, to get as close to the ocean as I could. How strange to stand on the shore and know that home was on the other side of that briny sea, but only able to see wave upon wave, dark and foreboding, but strangely seductive, too. Even stranger was the place where the ocean met the land: Dún Laoghaire was tidy, charming, quaint, with pretty treed streets and inviting little lanes and quite a nice church and the most aggressively friendly people I’d ever encountered, anywhere. There were swanky hotels and cozy little inns standing shoulder to shoulder along the cobbled streets, with bright facades, like heavily made-up faces, or stately Victorian shops in ruddy brick. All very civilised. And then right next to all this civilisation was the wild water of the Atlantic - churning and hurling itself against that pebbled beach and the walls of the pier. I wondered if the people of Dún Laoghaire had purposefully leaned into the rigid charm of the town, in an effort to put from their minds the wildness of the ocean that beat against their shore daily. Either way, it was a remarkable sight, and for the first time I began to have an inkling about sailors of old who longed to go to sea, despite its dangers.
The more staid aspects of this little seaside town were very pleasant, too, to give them their dues. It was very soothing to stroll up and down the pier, eating a 99 (soft serve with a chocolate stuck in it) to the dulcet tones of seagulls and the crash of waves. I stayed in a funny little bed and breakfast, full of twisted stairwells and mismatched furniture, where the proprietress made me an Irish breakfast and insisted that I eat it with so much vigour that I could hardly refuse, despite my day of travel ahead. I wondered, then, too, if that aggressive friendliness which seemed to greet me wherever I went in Ireland, was typical of island nations for whom the sea’s aggression was never distant - although, on second thought, the English are similarly insular, in both senses of that word, - and they were, in my experience, much less likely to offer to help with my luggage or holler ‘what’s the story?’ at me as I got on a bus. I hope to go back to Ireland soon - perhaps to find out more about those fiercely friendly folks, but also to reacquaint myself with the Atlantic again.
Jennifer
You’ve Got Mail
Autumn is not quite upon us yet, dear reader, but I am finding myself thinking increasingly of that best (and shortest) of seasons. Spring is cheerful, summer is lazy and languid, winter starts out invigorating and then slowly melts to a sodden, dirty grey puddle, but autumn - oh, autumn is beautiful and perfect from start to finish. The air gets crisp and tangy, even before it properly cools down, and the riot of colour from the finery of the trees never ceases to surprise and delight me. There are satisfying thunderstorms that rinse the heat and stickiness of summer away, leaving cool breezes and puddles pooling on the asphalt. At its commencement, autumn is for reaping summer’s bounty: ripe stone fruit and corn-on-the-cob, apple picking and more zucchini than you can shake a stick at. This is followed by what I now think of as ‘stationery season.’ I am no longer in school, but the urge to stock up on fresh pencils and pristine notebooks - as Anne would say, ‘with no mistakes in them’ - hits me like a freight train. Then it deepens into rusts and golds and brilliant oranges, ideal for cider and anything made with pumpkin, for cozy sweaters and chunky socks. In turn, autumn grows spooky and shivery: rustling leaves, encroaching dark, and the Witching Hour! And finally, autumn lays its head on a pillow, turns over, and falls asleep, giving way to winter, having had it’s last colourful hurrah. I know the New Year technically happens in January, but after literal decades of school, it’s hard not to think of the end of summer (the Sunday of the year, I always think), as the Old Year bowing out, and autumn as the New Year stepping in to take its place.
All of this charming and cozy fall goodness must needs be accompanied by another autumnal ritual, at least in my house: autumn movies. For whatever reason, there are a handful of films that not only take place in the fall, but seem to fairly sing of the season. I tend to think of them as ‘golden’ movies, or ‘oboe movies’ - because their colour palettes tend to feature autumnal colours so much, and their soundtracks accent the oboe, what we might consider the musical equivalent of a goose - very autumnal. Fly Away Home, Rudy, Sweet Home Alabama, Sleepless in Seattle, Practical Magic, Little Women, Dead Poet’s Society, When Harry Met Sally, and yes, You’ve Got Mail. While different in many ways, the characters in these films have one thing in common: they all seem to have enviable knitwear. These aren’t perfect films, but they are the movies that seem to align best with this time of year, so I dutifully make a cup of tea, put out some fresh baking, cocoon myself in a blanket, and watch them nearly every weekend from September to the end of November. You’ve Got Mail begins its plot in autumn - more specifically, autumn in New York - and when Meg Ryan waxes poetic about bouquets of sharpened pencils, it’s hard not to get nostalgic and yes, perhaps a little weepy about them with her.
The letters of this week’s episode, and the ‘oboe movies’ that I’ll be watching soon, both speak to nostalgia, the yearly pause that autumn brings, the beginnings of new journeys, and the deaths of the old. Perhaps Maya Angelou put it best in her poem, Preacher, Don’t Send Me:
I'd call a place
pure paradise
where families are loyal
and strangers are nice,
where the music is jazz
and the season is fall.
Promise me that
or nothing at all.
Jennifer
Testing, Testing
By the time I reached my first class in university, I was quite familiar - too familiar, in fact - with exams. But a new adversary was waiting for me in ARTH 1200 - the first-year course, a requisite for the following four years of art history classes. That was the slide test. In a darkened room, with a slide projector facing a screen, we were barraged with images, sometimes dozens of them, and asked to identify the image, its maker, its material, date, and two or three points of significance. This was rounded off with a few images paired together to prompt the essay portion of the test. We did these a handful of times per semester, the worst cases being when the tests were cumulative, and we had to keep the prehistoric cave paintings firmly in mind even as we juggled early Renaissance painters.
Some of these tests felt fair, reasonable, even. Even those cumulative tests in the first year felt doable, because it’s fairly straightforward to differentiate an Archaic Greek kouros sculpture from a Golden Age Islamic mosque in Cordoba. Were there moments when I forgot who painted The Raft of the Medusa and stared, unblinkingly, eye twitching, at the projected image, willing it with all my being to give up the answer? Yes, of course. It’s Gericault, by the way. But, generally speaking, slide tests in the first year were okay.
When I got to upper-level classes that were more specific, things got trickier. There is an in-between period in an art history degree where you have moved beyond the general, buffet-style first-year course wherein you cover dozens of cultures and several millennia in a term. Still, you have not yet made it to the research-and-paper-heavy fourth-year classes, where endless essays replace slide tests. These were the years of ARTH 1320 (Medieval Art) and ARTH 1450 (Chinese Landscape Painting) and, perhaps most difficult of all, CLAS 1340 and 1350. You’ll notice that those course codes are not in the Art History department, but in Classics - a new field, and one to which I did not have an immediate attachment. I like textiles, and those are pretty thin on the ground in the study of Ancient Greece and Rome. Instead of chitons and togas, we studied kylix after kylix, amphora after amphora. Were they distinguishable? Barely, and only by the figures painted on their surfaces. To make matters worse, the professor of CLAS 1340 (Greek Art), a man with an impressive moustache and a complete disdain for students, did not provide us with the slides to study. Instead, we were expected to memorize the images after a single viewing during class time. I hastily scribbled little sketches of each piece of art alongside my notes, hoping against hope that I would remember that the kantharos decorated with Hercules fighting the Nemean lion was from the 3rd century BC, while the kantharos painted with Hercules fighting the Lernean hydra was from the 2nd century BC—maddening stuff. The following section was Roman Art (CLAS 1350), taught by a different professor who was a bit more forgiving but completely obsessed with slipper lamps. Not a class went by that we did not spend some time, usually, quite a long time, talking about slipper lamps. They are small, palm-sized oil lamps made of clay and resemble a slipper, with one pointed end and one rounded end. I remember very little from the rest of that class.
I have now been on the other side of this equation, as it were, teaching first and second-year courses to students who similarly do not relish slide tests. I have tried to be a bit kinder to them, offering them the slides to study from beyond class hours, and avoiding tricksy questions such as those in my ARTH 1420 course (Byzantine Art), where I had to differentiate the Church of St. Demetrius in Vladimir patronised by Tzar Dimitri, or the Church of St. Vladimir in Dimitri patronised by Tsar Vladimir, who was Tzar Dimitri’s eldest son. I jest, but only just. And I offer them the same mnemonics I developed to survive these tests, such as the parts of a cruciform cathedral set to the tune of “Head and Shoulders” or to memorise the artworks in order so they know that Sofonisba Anguissola’s Self-Portrait definitely comes before Sonia Delauney’s Rythme (1556 and 1938, respectively). I will admit that, while marking is not generally a joyful experience, sometimes the desperate attempts at answers or go-for-broke responses become highlights in the drudgery of grading. I will also confess that I am not totally convinced that slide tests (and exams more generally) are the best tools for adjudicating a student’s work or progress, but here we are. To all those art history students who are in the process of plowing through their own slide tests, I can only promise that this too shall pass - slide tests will eventually become a nostalgic experience about which you will wax poetic, as I have just done.
Jennifer
Night Light
Nighttime is just about the most comfortable part of my day. Partially, that is because the heat and humidity tend to drop - a bit - so while the daytime feels like living in a pot of hot soup, things become marginally more pleasant and bearable once the sun is down. I can go outside for a walk, or leave the window open and enjoy the delicious breaths of perfumed wind that drift in, bringing the scent of daylilies with them. Things become quieter, too. I turn the fans off at night, so the constant whir of their blades and motors stops only when day has ended. I’m sure you can tell by now, dear reader, that summer is not my favourite season, and the kind of humidity one finds out East is still foreign to me - and I to it.
I have lived all my life in cities. Two big ones, and one medium one, and for a brief time, a tiny one, really more of a town, which just squeaked past the population requirements, pushing it toward city status. In all cases, I have been used to the soundtrack that usually accompanies such places, especially at night. The thrum of cars, the indistinct murmur of people talking, of neighbours walking overhead and dogs barking in backyards. This is my normal. But every once in a while, especially in summer, I long for a different kind of night music.
‘The Lake’ is a kind of catch-all term that people from the Prairies use to describe leaving the city. “I’m going to the lake” could mean there is an actual body of water at said destination, or it could mean roughing it in a campground with a tent, or it could mean a carpeted summer home with a dishwasher and a flat screen television. In my childhood, ‘the lake’ meant a cottage facing out over a dark, root beer brown lake in the White Shell (the lake was quite safe, just full of tannins). The cottage had non-potable water, mismatched furniture, and black bears, so our trash had to be driven to a special garbage site and locked in a caged dumpster. There was a green canoe, an orange paddle boat, and a dock with a rickety ladder so you could inch your way into the freezing water, one rung at a time. The living room of this cottage is burned in my memory, very likely because of a pair of taxidermied ducks on one wall, and a similarly stuffed goose over the television set, which did not get a signal but could play the three or four VHS tapes on offer. I watched Muppet Treasure Island on repeat until my parents were close to mutiny themselves.
Daytime at ‘the lake’ was full of swimming and cavorting around in the woods and devouring watermelon and swimming some more and taking one of the boats out to see the litle island in the middle of the lake, and reading on the dock and throwing dried peas to the flock of geese that visited and hanging towels to dry on the porch and banging the screen door and using my father’s binoculars to spot otters and muskrat and practicing somersaults in the lake and hunting for sliders and playing in the reeds and losing a shoe in the mud and listening for mice in the boathouse and running everywhere. There was too much to do and only so much daylight.
Night was a different matter. I was not keen on the dark at home, in my streetlight-lit suburb, but at the lake, the blackness that settled over everything wasn’t just the dark - it was The Dark. I would lie awake sometimes, trying to see anything, my eyes wide and staring into nothing, but there was no light to be had. Going to the bathroom or getting a cup of water was a terrifying prospect to a pre-teen with an overactive imagination. And when there is no light, no visual data to be had, one becomes very aware of sounds. There were birds who sang themselves to sleep as the sun dropped, and sometimes a loon would let out a crazed, heartbroken whoop in the night, but mostly nighttime brought a symphony of insects. There were crickets (very pleasant) and cicadas (horrible), and worst of all, the solitary mosquito, with its squealing, maddening hum, searching for a late-night snack in the dark - and I was the snack. Of course, the minute you turned on a light, the droning would stop. Was there a more satisfactory, glorious moment, though, when you did finally slam a hand down on said mosquito, and your room would go blissfully, beautifully quiet?
I had a little battery-operated toy lantern, which I used as a nightlight. It was green plastic and shaped like an old-fashioned hurricane lantern, with a handle on top and a flat, circular base. It threw a wan pool of light in my otherwise pitch-black room, casting shadows on the walls and keeping the monsters in my mind at bay. They say you can never go back, which is true, but, oh, dear reader, what I wouldn’t give for the deep, untroubled sleep of a ten-year-old who had played herself to exhaustion, watched Muppet Treasure Island until her eyelids grew heavy, and then drifted into dreams in the darkest, quietest, most peaceful room on earth, her nightlight burning faithfully beside her.
Jennifer
Going to the Ex
There is one Exhibition in my hometown every summer, although it is not a replica of the Great Exhibition: it’s more of a temporary theme park, with rides, games, fried food, and cheap plastic trinkets. I’m not wild about rollercoasters, so I’ve never been the Ex. My preference definitely swings towards events that are more specific to the Prairies and Midwest: agricultural fairs. These usually contain some combination of horse shows and cattle competitions, prizes for the biggest pumpkin or best rooster, festivals dedicated to corn and apples, sheep shearing, tractor pulls, and, charmingly, children’s pig wrangling. You can find a startling array of jams and preserves, wood carvings, quilts, ceramics, and other useful knick-knacks at these events, complementing the livestock and poultry.
Preparation for a fair of this kind is key. You will be on your feet all day, so comfortable shoes are a must. But there will also be every domesticated animal known to North America, so it’s best to skip your brightest white sneakers, and closed-toed shoes are preferable. It will be blisteringly hot, so a big hat and light clothes are a good bet. Do not try to look like a farmer or a cowboy - the real ones will be able to spot you a mile away, and frankly, so will everyone else. Be ready to drink lots of water and reapply sunscreen like it’s going out of style.
You will start with the horses. They will be surprising - you are very likely to see horses bigger than you thought it possible for horses to be. Seventeen, eighteen hands high, with hooves like dinner plates and backs you cannot see over. These are the gentle giants, the plough and draft horses, descendants of the muscle on farms of old. They are intimidating to look at, but usually quite sweet in nature. The ones you want to watch for are the ponies. Small, barrel-bellied little hellions, with wild eyes and nasty tempers, Shetlands are especially moody. As a general rule, I avoid them entirely. In all cases, regardless of size, their barns will smell pleasantly of sweet hay and manure, of homemade fly spray and hoof oil. This is a divine perfume, exclusive to such events.
There will be cows next. These will be the cleanest cows you’ve ever seen. They will be, like the draft horses, astonishing in size, and positively glowing. They will chew their cud placidly as an energetic teenager curries their backs with aggressive swipes. The calves, weaners, and stirks will be curious and inclined to explore everything with nuzzling noses and tongues. Like human toddlers, they explore the world by putting things in their mouths.
If there are sheep, they will be the most delightful of all the livestock. Their lambs will stick close by, tails wagging at startling speed, especially when feeding. The sheep, too, will be cleaner than any you’re likely to encounter, but that might be hard to spot at first. Generally, they are decked out in blankets or fly sheets, little sheep-shaped outfits that cover them, nose to tail, to protect them from flies and keep their gleaming fleeces clean in their stalls. Most of these sheets go over the sheep’s head, with eye and ear holes cut out. They tend to have a sort of Sheep from Space look about them, like little sheepy astronauts, which is very possibly the most charming thing you’ll see all day.
You will admire chickens and roosters with unusual plumage, especially those with feathery feet. You’ll exclaim over the excitement of sheepdog trials and the excruciating sweetness of little pink piglets, nosing in straw and staring up at you through impossibly long lashes. There will be dog and cat shows, and the usual solo llama farm represented by some very bad-tempered llamas, alongside the enthusiastic knitter who raises them for their wool. She - and it is always nearly ‘she’ - will be more than happy to show you how a spinning wheel works, and sell you a skein or two of her finest alpaca. Very often, the creature who produced the wool in question will be made known to you on the label, so you can say ‘thank you’ to Betsy, Pumpernickel, or Steve for their gift.
A word on food: the choices on offer may make you quite giddy. Turkey legs, roasted and eaten like a medieval lord; huge sandwiches, impossible to eat with dignity; funnel cakes and ice cream, melting down your chin; cotton candy, sticky and sickly sweet, in unnatural colours; and gallons of lemonade, with significant pucker power. Tread with caution - fair food is one area in life where less is more.
When you have seen every possible stall and show, filled your arms with jars of pickles and jellies and wildflower honey and your mind with memories, it will be time to pack up and go home, to say goodbye to the fair until next year. I can promise you the best sleep of your life after a day in the sun, and a newfound appreciation for the smell of manure. I’ll meet you there next summer.
Jennifer
Camelot
You know the Richard Burton - Julie Andrews musical, Camelot? It details that age-old story of Guinivere and Arthur and Lancelot, with jaunty show tunes and frankly stunning costuming, and an excellent original soundtrack album. I was reminded of it this past weekend, when I attended my first Medieval and Fantasy Fair.
Let me set the scene. It was hotter than Hades, the steamy, sticky heat that is a specialty in Quebec. I wore an enormous sun hat and only the lightest linen clothes, and still felt sure that I would melt by the end of the day. Happily, there was much to distract me from the sweaty, pressing weather. Immediately upon arrival, we were delighted to encounter a handful of ponies and some quite nice dappled grey horses, munching hay in their paddock. The pony’s mane and tail had been very skillfully dyed in a rainbow - the reason for this would become clear later. There was live music and dancing, demonstrations of archery and swordplay, a court jester festooned with bells, stilt walkers, face painting, and purveyors of a startlingly wide range of goods for purchase.
There was also an ongoing display of 17th-century French warfare tactics, which meant that for much of the day, live cannons and muskets fired with little warning, and smelled strongly of sulphur. There were people dressed as pirates, as dragons, as mermaids, as Orcs and other mythical creatures from Tolkien, with more rubber elf ears and flower crowns than you could shake a stick at. During the literal horse and pony show (wherein some pretty high-level dressage was taking place), the tie-dyed pony in question had been decked out with a sparkly horn to make him into a minuscule unicorn, albeit with the characteristic barrel belly so many Shetlands have. He was charming and delighted the small princes, knights, fairies and dragon hunters in the crowd. Frankly, I was delighted by him too.
Now, some of you may be thinking, ‘well, none of that fits the Medieval category’, and you’d be right, dear reader. You’ll notice that the organisers of this event very cleverly tacked “and Fantasy” onto their medieval fair, so that any and all could ostensibly fit in. However, this link between fantasy and the medieval world reminded me of this week’s episode. For some reason - possibly the Victorians, perhaps the Camelot musical, or some other, unknown connection - people seem very ready to associate the medieval period and its loosely understood aesthetics with the worlds of fantastical beings, heroic deeds, and fair damsels. As we saw in this week’s episode, the medieval period wasn’t actually all that full of damsels in distress, and the closest we come to fantastic beasts are in the marginalia of illuminated manuscripts. Perhaps because the era is so distant, so very far away from our own, it lacks the sharp detail in our imaginations that more recent periods possess, and so we are happy to fill in the blanks with whatever suits our fancy.
And it isn’t just modern folks, like the ones I met at the Medieval and Fantasy Fair. Remember Camelot, the musical? The whole thing ends with Richard Burton plaintively asking that we, the audience, remember that the magic and mystery, the pleasantness and inevitable tragedy of Camelot, existed—a place where it never rained or snowed out of season, where love blossomed as a matter of course, a place of shining glory. But of course, whether in the Thomas Malory stories or the musical, Camelot is itself a fantasy, too. Maybe, after all is said and done, that’s not a bad thing. Perhaps it’s a help, not a hindrance, to have a fantastical place to escape to on the weekends, to let our fancy run wild, and if we choose to call that place Camelot, then so much the better.
Jennifer
Bad Hair Day
I have never had a hair dye fiasco, very possibly because I read Anne of Green Gables as a little girl and was duly warned off trying to mess with Mother Nature too much. I have absolutely had bad hair days. The fringe I had in elementary school, which I did not know how to wrangle successfully, probably did not help matters. But, before elementary school, before I read Anne of Green Gables, there was a very bad, no-good, awful hair day.
On weekends, I woke up very early and played in my room, or sometimes went downstairs to watch cartoons. My parents would have coffee in bed while I entertained myself, usually setting up melodramas with my stuffed animals. So it was one fateful Saturday morning. As my mother tells it, she and my father were enjoying their coffee, half-listening to me talk to my toys in my room. And then, alarmingly, my running commentary faded into silence. As anyone with children will tell you, silence may be golden, but it is not your friend. And then, according to my mother’s memory, a little voice pierced this worrying silence.
"Uh oh.”
My parents flew from their room to mine, coffee long forgotten, and stared down in horror at my handiwork. I had gotten my pudgy little hands on a pair of craft scissors and gone to town on my bangs. As a three-year-old (and until about the age of ten or eleven), I had a straight, fine fringe, usually split by an untameable widow’s peak. But that morning, evidently displeased by my unruly hair, I had slowly and methodically cut my bangs - off. There was a tiny stiff line of what was left of my bangs sticking straight up from my hairline, and the rest lay on the floor.
My poor mother. There was no chance of saving my fringe - there wasn’t really any fringe left to save. She whisked away the scissors, explained very carefully that we do not cut our own hair, and did her level best to cover my shameful hairline with a headband. The headband situation would become my reality for about four months while my mirco-micro-micro bangs grew back out again.
Since then, I have had bad hairstyles - does anyone else remember the sidebangs of the 2000s, or the crispy frying sounds of a wet-to-straight flat iron on damp hair? - but have never attempted another DIY haircut. I learned that lesson the hard way. I do still have a store of emergency headbands - just in case. What I do not have, and may never have, is enough apologies to my long-suffering parents. Sorry, Mum.
Jennifer
Painted Wings and Diamond Rings
You know, dear reader, diamond rings might be well and good, but when I was writing the script for this week’s episode, I was first reminded about rather a different kind of jewellery. I had a small, choice collection of dress-up gear as a kid - a sparkly tutu skirt my mother made, decked with gold sequins, a glittery fairy wand and crown, and costume jewellery. There was a strand of plastic orange star beads, and a set of multicoloured wooden beads that, to my childish mind, smacked of Cleopatra’s finery. These paired very well, in my estimation, with the stick-on earrings someone had given me, that came by the dozens on a sheet of paper, and which did not stay on especially well. These trinkets ornamented my queenly garb (an old dressing gown) or marked me out as an all-powerful witch (a black cape) or adorned my stage outfit for those times that I was a ballerina-singer-musician-superstar. I might have gazed in awe at my mother’s real jewellery box, but the objects in it were not for playing with. So, at least to pre-school Jennifer, the plastic stuff was more valuable, because it was more useable, and because it was mine.
Later (say, around twelve) I was allowed to walk the blocks to the local convenience store or corner gas station, and buy a bag of pick-and-mix or a syrupy slushie, and I can still recall the thrill of getting a ring pop to enjoy, feet dangling from the bleachers near the baseball diamond in the school grounds nearby, full of sugar and the kinds of eager, unmitigated excitement girls have when they are twelve, before it’s been squashed out of them. Someone knew how to make a dandelion crown, and there were inevitable trades and gifts of friendship bracelets, pony bead keychains, embroidery floss hair wraps. This is the sort of jewellery that comes with summer camp and late July nights, when your skin is sticky from the heat and you’re walking home with friends, talking a hundred miles an hour and feeling a kind of certainty and boundless joy that becomes rare, endangered, sometimes extinct, in adulthood. The bracelets and crowns might not have precious gems, but they were, without question, valuable - and while they might not be as storied or famous as the Koh-i-Noor as we discovered in this week’s episode, they were heavy with meaning.
Jennifer
Something Up My Sleeve
When I was little, I had this incredible floral dress, smocked on the front, which I adored. Green-blue ditsy print? Check. Peter Pan collar? Check. Lacy trim? Check. Long puffy sleeves? Check. I was so keen on this dress that I wore it for days and refused to give it up in exchange for clean clothes. Eventually, my mother had to wrestle it off me, but it continued to be a favourite until it was thread-bare and too small for me. I miss that dress. Well, let me clarify: I don’t really want to wear a little girl’s summer dress these days, but I would like to find clothes that make me feel the way that dress made me feel. Ah well. Perhaps that kind of fever-pitch adoration is specific to childhood. Maybe I do want to wear a little girl's summer dress after all.
Or what about that excellent red pinafore - the one emblazoned with Scottish terriers, that inevitably went along with matching tights and a little white shirt, and shiny buckled shoes. I would absolutely wear that dress today - sure, maybe I’d skip the dog-printed tights and the patent leather mary janes, but I would wear a nice plaid pinafore every day forever if it were socially acceptable (and maybe even if it weren’t.) These days, you may be surprised to learn that it is not common to find adult women’s clothing that feature black and white terriers in a jolly little line, trimming a skirt, more’s the pity. At some point, we all decided that we no longer wanted velour kitten sweatshirts or giraffe pajamas, much to my sadness and confusion. I long for vibrantly coloured stirrup pants and denim bucket hats, with big daisies on the front. Or how about my first pair of jeans, embroidered and emblazoned as they were with lobsters on the pockets? Who among us doesn’t want lobster jeans?
I am being facetious - but only slightly. Perhaps it isn’t the specifics of the clothing - the animal designs, the bizarre embroidery, the coordinated outfits - it’s the way those clothes meant only joy, only feeling like myself, only satisfaction before I tore off to make magic potions in the bathroom sink or organise a safari in my backyard. These days, of course, jeans do not immediately spark joy, with or without lobsters: they induce panic and fretting, and sometimes quite a lot of math. Am I this size or this size? No one knows, and no one can know - sizing for women’s clothing is one of our universe’s greatest mysteries, like quantum physics and the Crazy Frog song. When faced with impenetrable sizing systems and endless choices, all dubious - high-waisted, low-rise, skinny, straight, barrel-leg, wide-leg, stretch, distressed, selvege, vintage, boot-cut, flare, cropped, ankle, shaping, five-pocket, acid-wash, dark-wash, light-wash, jeggings - maybe embroidered lobsters would be welcome. Perhaps we could use cheerful crustacean friends to guide us through an ocean of jeans.
Anne goes basically feral about the ideal dress - puffed sleeves and all - and I think, especially in this modern world of fast fashion, of vanity sizing, of the tyranny of choice - perhaps we might like very much the simplicity of having only three dresses, as Anne does, and an extra special one for Christmas - puffed sleeves or not.
Jennifer
Be True to Your School
My high school experience felt quite normal to me, but in the years since my graduation, I have learned that this is not so. I went to an all-girls school, for one, and wore a uniform about which I have mixed feelings even to this day, for six years. My school was also very small, so any sporting event was reason enough to get all the students (all five hundred of us) on the bleachers in the gym to support each and every team. Volleyball, floor hockey, basketball, handball - you name it. If there was a game on, we were trouped into the gym, handed noisemakers and cheerleading pompoms, and encouraged to scream ourselves hoarse. This was quite different to our normal way of life. If, in class, the volume rose too high, our teachers were wont to look ferociously down their noses at us and utter a single word: “Ladies…” This shut us up every time. So imagine our delight at not only being allowed to be loud, but down right spurred to do so! I didn’t always follow the games especially well, not knowing the rules of most sports, but it wasn’t hard to holler along when everyone else did, and chat with my friends in between screaming sessions.
Perhaps the best part about all this school spirit was our mascot. Our school teams were the Flames, and an image of a lighted torch always accompanied our high school’s motto and name. It’s not a bad team name, as sports teams go, and you could do worse than a torch as a school logo. Someone had obviously gone to a lot of trouble to make a torch mascot costume, worn by an enthusiastic girl in the grade below mine, and she did her mightiest to work us all into the appropriate frenzy - dressed, as best as I could tell, as a bright orange onion. The torch costume was not convincing, and I have to assume that competing teams were bewildered and perplexed by a school that stamped and bellowed when bidden to do so by a human-sized polyester allium bulb.
Now, of course, we had chants, and charming little songs, and made all the noise we could muster with the school-sanctioned hand clappers, tambourines, and even kazoos (an ear-splitting experience we only did once). Our school did not have cheerleaders (too small, and only girls), so when faced with school events, the received wisdom seemed to be that if no one was a cheerleader, then we all were. My mother has often remarked that a church with a good choir will often have a congregation who slacks when it comes to singing hymns, and the same maxim appears to be true of high school sports events. If you have no cheerleaders to lead chants and bounce around energetically, then the ‘congregation’, as it were, must take on the mantle and do it themselves. So it was: I routinely shook a tambourine and howled for sports I didn’t understand, adding my voice to the din when our side got a foul, whatever that was, or scored a goal - or was it a try? I didn’t know, and I cared less.
Mob mentality gets a bad rap, probably rightly. But there was something thrilling and exciting about leaping up with my friends and all four hundred and ninety or so other girls when the basketball team won their provincial tournament, shrieking and jumping up and down so enthusiastically that the bleachers shook. I did not know the first thing about three-pointers or travelling, but I did know that the girls on the court were ecstatic at their success, and it was intoxicating to join them in their joy. Besides, there is nothing quite like seeing a schoolmate - sobbing with elation (her sister was on the team), running up and down the length of the bleachers, inciting greater and greater throes of wild celebration - dressed like an onion.
Jennifer
House of Dreams
In the fifth installment of the Anne series, our beloved protaganist moves into her very own home, her ‘House of Dreams’. Anne’s House of Dreams has lombardy trees and an old-fashioned garden, china dogs on the mantle, and drift wood in the fireplace. My house of dreams is a bit different. I have, in the course of the research for this project, looked up those china dogs, and they are green, so my house goes without a Gog and Magog.
Instead, my house of dreams has a window seat, kitted out for our cat’s express use, which looks out over the front garden, which is planted in the English style - that is to say, higgledy-piggledy, barely contained wildness. The facade is brick, ensconced in trees and box hedge with a creaky gate that squeaks as you come in. There is a light on over the front door to welcome you in, and a sonorous doorbell. The front door has a kickplate and a charming doorknocker in the shape of a robin.
Every seat in the living room is furnished with an obvious place to put a mug of tea and a book. There are books in every room. The kitchen is always stocked with goodies for sharing: the sorts of things that you put out when friends drop by. Sweating jugs of lemonade and iced tea for the oppressive heat of summer afternoons; spiced tea for crisp autumn mornings; cookies and hot cocoa for winter Sunday visits that curl up in the embrace of wool blankets; peppermint tea for misty springtime gatherings. Sunlight streams in the windows and handmade curtains wave in the breeze. The floors pop and creak when you walk down the hall or up the stairs. There is a dog snoozing in a basket beside my desk as I work, and the cat, of course, has taken up her post in the bay window, surveilling her domain. There is local art on the walls and the strains of music coming from my husband’s office. There are spare beds and extra slippers, sweet-smelling soap and fresh flowers from the garden.
Oh, the garden! Follow that curving stone path from the back door past the raised beds and the vegetable patch and the trellis and the esplanaded trees. Just as you wish for a place to sit, a charming bench comes in to view, partially hidden by forsythia and shaded by Japanese magnolia. There isn’t any grass, just flowering thyme and a carpet of clover. The dog loves it. You’re likely to meet a cheerful neighbour over the fence, who will compare notes on the coming rain and bulbs they planted in the spring.
However, despite all these differences, there are some similarities. Just ike Anne’s home, my house of dreams is also fictional.
Jennifer
My Cup of Tea
I am not a coffee drinker. I have tried coffee, many times, and it’s just not for me. I know it is a popular beverage, guzzled by the gallon or sipped in Italian cafes at eye-watering strength, loaded with flavoured creamers and sugar or stomached black and bitter, but while coffee smells absolutely delicious, it tastes very much to me like a soggy rug. I cannot imagine why someone would wish to begin their morning by drinking a cup of dirty molded carpet out of a car recently returned from the Outer Hebrides, but to each their own.
But tea? Tea is…well, my cup of tea. Every morning, I get up and fill up the kettle, choose my mug, drop a tea bag or strainer full of leaves into it, and wait for the water to boil. My kettle reminds me of a spaceship - it’s round, and glows blue while the water heats up. Then I wait for the tea to steep - this is a persnickety process. Some varieties, like the decaffeinated Earl Grey I favour in afternoons, are pitifully weak and need to steep for a long time, unless I want to drink a sad, grey cup of hot water, which tastes as though someone in the next room said ‘tea’. But the loose-leaf chai that usually starts my morning is powerful stuff and needs a scant few minutes to produce a robust, spicy, warming cup, perfect for the chilly days of winter. Now that the temperatures are rising, I still reach for tea, but more often I am reaching for haystack, or Earl Grey, or white tea, or genmaicha, a Japanese green tea that is mixed with popped rice, which has a toasty, slightly sweet flavour reminiscent of caramel and popcorn.
I started to drink tea as a kid, sipping ‘baby tea’ - essentially, quite a lot of hot milk with a bit of tea - with my mother. Since then, tea has become a panacea, an all-purpose potion. It soothes sore throats, sadness, and social interactions. Someone coming over this afternoon? Tea. Sweating in the summer heat? Tea (iced, of course). Working in a chilly office? Tea. Need a break from that work? Tea. Heavy-duty chats with a friend? Tea. Meeting an acquaintance at a coffee shop? Tea. Tea does it all - wakes you up, calms you down, warms you, cools you, busies your hands, stills your mind. Tea, it seems to me, answers all questions.
And that’s only the drinking. The making of tea presents a whole world of possibilities. Filling the kettle, preparing your cup, pouring the water, watching the tea steep, adding milk, curling your hand around the mug - what a beautiful, day-starting dance! To say nothing of choosing your mug or cup. Should it be the novelty owl mug, which holds a bathtub’s worth of tea? The demure botanical print mugs, with matching green tea pot, passed down to me from my grandmother? Or the even more delicate china cups, rimmed with pale blue flowers? The mug brought home from that trip with that friend? I reached for the art history mug when I was grading papers as a teacher, and now I favour a book-emblazoned cup when I write. But no matter the mug, I know that the ritual of making tea, and then of drinking a cup (or two, or three), will set the world to rights and give me whatever comfort I need. You could say it suits me to a tea.
Jennifer
Make your cake and eat it, too: Part 1
Fruitcake (Bara Brith)
Now, dear reader, this is a fruitcake, but it is not the kind people typically eat at Christmas. Those recipes usually call for a lot of tricky-to-find ingredients - candied this, glazed that - and one usually soaks the resulting paving stone of cake in a lot of rum. Frankly, dear reader, this is the sort of recipe my mother can handle, but I am not grown up enough yet to face it. Instead, I offer you a simpler recipe that produces a snacking cake studded and sweetened with dried fruit - similar to the Christmas fruitcake, it is old-fashioned and satisfying, but much easier to pull off. This cake is called bara brith, Welsh for spotted bread, named for the plump, tea-soaked fruit that features in this loaf cake. Why did I choose this one? Well, because like a traditional fruitcake, bara brith relies on dried, re-hydrated fruit for its sweetness and texture. Plus, it’s a personal favourite. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do!
Ingredients:
300 g mixed dried fruit (you’ll typically see raisins or currants, but I am partial to chopped apricots or cranberries, too - follow your heart here, dear reader)
200 g sugar
zest of 1 orange
250 g hot black tea (the variety is up to you - I like Earl Grey because of its bergamot oil, which combines well with the orange zest)
350 g self-rising flour
10 g mixed spice (this is equal parts cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and clove, but I measure these out with my heart, not a teaspoon. Skip the clove for a more modern flavour)
1 egg
50 g softened butter, plus extra for the cake tin
Instructions:
In a large bowl, mix together the fruit, sugar, and the orange zest. Pour the hot tea over this mixture, and allow to soak overnight.
Heat your oven to 160 C. Butter and line your cake tin with parchment.
In a large bowl, combine flour and spice thoroughly. Add the fruit mixture, including the liquid, in thirds, mixing thoroughly. Add your egg and butter, then mix until your batter is well-combined and somewhat stiff. The cake is dense, so the batter will be, too.
Bake for 60-75 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the cake comes out clean. If you notice the top begin to brown too much, cover the top with foil.
Leave the cake to cool in the tin, about 10 minutes. Then put your finished cake on a baking rack and allow to cool completely. Serve slices on their own, or with butter. Tea is not a requirement, but the two go together very well. Enjoy!