And the nominee is...

Every now and again I see women's magazines having contests, such as "Canada's Best Husband," things like that. Well, in anticipation of some such event, I would like to go ahead and nominate my dear husband Daniel. There are multifarious ways in which I believe him to be the best husband ever, anywhere, but this recent happening nears the top of the list. Last night, innocently enough (I thought), I decided to unravel a center-pull ball of brown yarn that had its guts all hanging out most messily, with the intention of rewinding it. Well. It immediately became a most disconcertingly tangled mess, and my dear, sweet, longsuffering husband spend no less than one hour untangling it. No matter that said ball of yarn is being made into a scarf for him--he still gets full points for doing that.

That Eagle Scout knots badge sure comes in handy in most unexpected ways.

This one's for Linda

Best 2006 greetings to all. May the year be rich with God's joy and blessings for you & yours.

You can thank my mother-in-law's persistance for this post's finally coming to the light. Were it not for her, Weeds would be weeded for good. Surely I need not mention that all the excitement & busyness of 2005 has led to a serious dirth of blogging for yours truly. I did get a freak surge of enthusiasm for posting in November, which led to some premature promises, but I rapidly returned to my original position of, What the heck's the point?


You see, this blog was born a few days after Matthew Davidson said to me at the pub, I met the perfect guy for you. And as much as I hate to prove Matthew right, he indeed was, and now the perfect guy for me, for the benefit of whom Weeds was created, lives right here with me. Since I have successfully grabbed and held Daniel's attention, and we are now married, I figure Weeds has served its purpose. I can't seem to be bothered to make the time to do it: living with Daniel takes up a good deal more of my time than blogging, emailing and talking to him on the phone ever did--not to mention how he keeps the computer tied up with sudoku puzzles. And now I've gone and added a new obsession to my life, knitting, which I prefer to nearly any occupation--in fact, I'd rather be knitting right now, I've 16 inches left to go on my second legwarmer. But here I am anyway: I got that "it's now or never" feeling this morning, and went for it.

I make no promises this time. I may not ever be back. In one of Mary Oliver's essays she instructed her loved ones to rejoice if she showed up late, or didn't show up at all, to a meeting with them, because that would mean that she's working on a poem. If you find this blog continually devoid of new posts, you can rejoice that I am deep in my rich & blissful life, that I am knitting, reading, taking long walks on Panama Hill with the hummingbirds and red-winged blackbirds, cooking, and tickling Daniel.

For now, here is the reading list for 2005. Very short on fiction, which tempts me to ask: what are the two, three best fiction works you've read, recently or ever?




FICTION

**The Brothers K, David James Duncan

Atonement, Ian McEwan

*Angle of Repose, by Wallace Stegner

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, by Carson McCullers

Specimen Days, by Michael Cunningham

Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather

A Complicated Kindness, by Miriam Toews

A River Runs Through It, by Norman McLean

a few Chekhov short stories

Pale Horse, Pale Rider, Katherine Anne Porter


NON-FICTION

Another Beauty, Adam Zagajewski

On the Corner of East and Now, Frederica Mathewes-Greene

Two-Part Invention, Madeleine L'Engle

Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke

A Cook's Tour, Anthony Bourdain

La Plus Que Vive, Christian Bobin

Long Life, Mary Oliver

Eats, Shoots & Leaves, Lynne Truss

Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life, Elizabeth Krouse Rosenthal

Plan B, Anne Lamott

Quotidian Mysteries, Kathleen Norris

*Life Work, Donald Hall

Blue Like Jazz, Donald Miller

Home: Tales of a Heritage Farm, by Anny Scoones

The Best Day The Worst Day, Donald Hall

*Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, by Larry McMurtry

In a Narrow Grave, by Larry McMurtry

My Life with Pablo Neruda, by Matilde Urrutia

The Orchid Thief, by Susan Orlean

The Polysyllabic Spree, by Nick Hornby

*A Place of My Own, by Michael Pollan

Celebration of Discipline, by Richard Foster

Anthropology of Turquoise, by Ellen Meloy

Second Nature, by Michael Pollan

Virgin Time, by Patricia Hampl

A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit

some Joan Didion essays

*Things Seen and Unseen, by Nora Gallagher

*The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion

Full Bloom: The Art and Life of Georgia O'Keeffe, by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

Stitch & Bitch: the Knitter's Handbook, by Debbie Stoller

Weekend Knitting, by Melanie Fallick


POETRY

The Great Fires, by Jack Gilbert

Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida, by Roo Borson

Twenty-Seven Small Songs and Thirteen Silences, by Jan Zwicky

Robinson's Crossing, by Jan Zwicky

Miraculous Hours, by Matt Rader

Ecstatic in the Poison, by Andrew Hudgins

The Never-Ending, by Andrew Hudgins

The Painted Bed, by Donald Hall

...but, mostly, as ever, Mary Oliver, Jane Kenyon, and some Billy Collins.

Not just yet...

The poetry engine

... is like that of my faithful old Jetta: even if unused for two weeks in the most bitter Montreal January cold, once you've cleared it of a foot-or-so of snow and put the key in, and turn, the engine roars back to life smoothly, ready for action.




Such are the things

Among the things that wake and open
under the fingers of high spring rain, count:
the belly of the cat, as she sleeps away the Sunday
morning on her back, the soft vulnerable fur
uncovered; the pages of the poetry book which,
though their paleness concedes a small allotment to black
type, still enclose both silence and meaning;
the leaves, black and potent, in the teapot.

Also—the dream-horse and its cart, possibility:
the hours open to them like a road, like a stable,
like the place you only know you were going to once
you get there. And, beyond, this: the years, their dip
and curve, their puzzle-face like cloud shadows and light
playing on a wooded hillside. And even after that: the clean,
cool taste of rain on the lips, the salty familiarity
of your mouth, and time neatly folded like a handkerchief,
put to sleep in a wooden chest where the mice may, or may
not—who can tell ?—enter.

Such are the things—honeysuckle, oak leaves—that
rise up and bloom in the Sunday spring rain.

My Big Fat Priest Wedding

I've been mulling over for a few weeks now how best to address the upcoming nuptials here on Weeds. A close second reason for the low output these last weeks (the first being, of course, utter lack of time, and the abundance of stuff that was just more important) is a reluctance to turn this site completely over to romantic musings. I'm wary of falling into that girly trap of talking about my boyfriend all the time--I'm an intellectual dammit, I don't go in for that. Or so I'd like to think. Now that it feels as though my whole life has been swallowed up by wedding talk, it seems like a good time to give up that pretense and write a few girly lines. But thoughtful girly lines.

I'm gonna go ahead and register my support for the sort of girlish behaviour which leads young women (and a not a few keen tweens and toddlers as well, I'm sure) to imagine their wedding day down to the last marzipan-or-royal-icing, white-or-ivory detail: truth is, you never know how quickly you might have to put a wedding together. If called upon to do so, one would be thankful to have all such preferences, as well as venues for receptions & the song for the first dance, already picked out. I certainly was.

So that, fairly soon after Daniel and I, sitting on the couch one night of his visit, decided to get married (it was a sort of, "So, you wanna?" "Yeah. You?" "Yeah" kinda thing--no knees were dropped or rings proffered, nor, in retrospect, do I wish there had been) I could unscroll the vision for him, and set about making it happen. So that, a mere four weeks after the decisive moment and nearly a full four months ahead of the actual date, everything is more or less set, decided upon and booked. We have a date (though nailing that down was a bit of a comedy of errors), a chapel for the ceremony, a venue for the reception, a caterer, a cake-maker, a photographer, a live band, I have a dress and shoes, we have rings, I've chosen which flowers I want, we've made reservations for the honeymoon and found the apartment we're going to live in. That's right--I'm a five-foot, rock n' rollin', wedding plannin' powerhouse. There are two governing principles I've been operating with: one, I want this wedding to look and feel like us, and two, and I want to be able to stop thinking about its various aspects as soon as possible. This means that if I see something I like, I go for it, which enables me to quit thinking about that item and cross it off my list. I'm not a keep-options-open kinda gal (Hello? I'm getting married.) Of course it goes without saying that absolutely all elements of this to-do must cohere to make the night rock. And that it will.

Something we've heard a fair bit of while making the announcement rounds is, What's the rush? Why don't you wait a little longer? And while I would generally agree that prudence and caution are good things, and that waiting is nearly always a good idea, I just--we just (sorry Matthew--had to revert to couplespeak there)--don't think it's necessary here. I'm twenty-six, and have been waiting for this my whole life. Wouldn't you say that twenty-six years is plenty of time? (To be fair, I have in the past thought that the waiting was over, but turns out I was mistaken.)

By which I mean, just as the vision for the wedding was already set to roll when we decided to get married, thus allowing us to move quickly, so I feel that I was being prepared to meet Daniel long before we actually did, so that when the moment came, I was ready and I knew it. (And I'm not quite sure, when I write moment here, which I mean: when we started emailing seriously in November? When we declared our love in December? When we met in March? I dunno. All of the above, I guess.)

And so I consider myself a fairly calm bride-to-be. And I'm even ever-so-very-slightly resentful at how much time, care & talk this wedding venture is requiring, because for me it's not at all the main event on the horizon. No matter how excited I am about the day itself (just wait til you see the shoes), that pales in comparison to how excited I am about the prospect of having Daniel around everyday, of making a home and building a life together, of cooking and reading and laughing and walking and driving and playing chess together.

Now that is gonna rock.

And the blog rose again on Easter day...

Every year, the Place community gathers, at six am, on the beach at Gyro Park for an Easter sunrise service. The previous night, some enterprising and handy soul goes out, fashions three crosses out of driftwood and erects them by the water. In the dark of dawn folks rise from their beds and make their weary way to Caddy Bay. It is, as our pastor Randy likes to say, the high point of the year for this bunch of believers. It certainly is for this believer.

This was my fourth sunrise service, and the first in which the weather wasn't ideal. It was raining when I woke, which led me to think that the weather would separate the sheep from the goats, and that there'd only be a couple dozen of us hardcores huddled around a fire, guitar and upright bass getting wet. But driving in to the parking lot, seeing it so full, I realized that perhaps I am the only weather wimp in Victoria, and that no one else was fazed by a little rain. Either that or folks reason like my friend Stephanie, who said "After what Jesus did for us, we can pretty well get up early & be out in the rain."

My friend Christina and I shared my beach mat with Jo, she and I huddled under a blanket (yes hon--that blanket.) Our band that morning consists of acoustic guitar, upright bass, accordion, two female singers and a male lead. As we sang through Easter favourites--Here By The Water, You Laid Aside Your Majesty, My Jesus I Love Thee--I recalled sunrise services past. The first one, in 2002, when a bunch of friends and I had slept on the beach the night before, and the full moon had shone on us and the on the ocean. The next year, as I read a meditation (the morning includes poetic and liturgical elements as well as singing) the wisps of clouds above the rising sun--I swear this is true--formed the shape of a cross. A picture of this appeared on the cover of the newspaper the next day. I thought, How cool is this, how great to be living in Victoria and be worshipping with such fine, fine people.

Easter's theme of new life, new beginnings, holds a whole new meaning for me this year. It first struck me with great force on Friday night, when I attended, as I do each year, the Tenebrae choral service at St John the Divine, a long piece of liturgy in which a lenghty reading from Lamentations culminates in the gorgeous, heartbreaking choral rendition of Psalm 51, Miserere mei, Deus as arranged by Gregorio Allegri. The first time I heard the piece was at that service in 2002, just a few months after the demise of my ill-fated, youthful first marriage. All through Lent I'd been wrestling with Psalm 51, and that night it finally, memorably, beautifully broke my heart. Both the psalm and the choral piece have been steady companions since then, and yet, familiar as they are, again they utterly broke my heart this Friday. No matter how familiar to me the singing is, it takes on new depths when sung live by breathing, moving people, as opposed to echoing out of my stereo speakers. And, as I read along in my NKJV, I heard verse 10 with new ears: "Create in me a clean heart, O God." I heard my own cry, from Lent of 2002 and onward, for God to wipe clean the slate of my heart, sweep away the guilt and brokenness and shame of a broken marriage, and give me another chance. And clear as day I could see that God has heard, and answered, that prayer. And I cried, cried hard, for the beauty of the music, for the greatness of my God and my own smallness, for my immense and overwhelming gratitude--and for the life-giving love of my beloved. After the choir goes quiet, the order or service leaflet gives these instructions: Silence is kept. A loud noise indicates the earthquake and the tombs being broken. All people depart in silence and disorder. I've always loved that last line, silence and disorder. On Friday, stepping out onto the street, I was resolutely looking towards the lights of Sunday morning. (Oh, that, and singing Avril Lavigne with Matthew on the way to the pub.)

Back to the beach. The sun didn't make a spectacular piercing through the clouds, like Thomas' finger, to prod at our unbelief, but it did glow from behind the clouds, as Randy led us in the glorious rousing cry, He is risen! He is risen indeed! The next song we did was Shout To The Lord. This was the song my ex and I had chosen to have at our wedding, and I have seldom since then heard or sang it without pain, be it sharp or dull. This morning, I sang it happily and confidently, hitting the high notes as I never have. That old thing, that ragged animal, is dead, done, buried. A new thing has been called forth, and has risen from the ashes. He is risen. Indeed.

Memorably, a few years ago, Matthew concluded his Easter meditation thusly: If the Lord is risen, then let's hang out. This is what we've been recalling, and doing, ever since, at the end of the sunrise service. We greet each other saying, He is risen! He is risen indeed! (I rather think we should do this everyday.) We feast on hot chocolate and cinnamon buns. We make our way to breakfast potlucks. Later in the morning, we nap.

We believe in the promise. We look forward to new life.

This blog needs more Korea

Thanks to my friend Matthew Hooton, who has just joined the blogworld (and this gal's blogroll--he's the guy responsible for Sure Fire), Weeds goes global. (And before you ask--yes, even I have trouble keeping track of all my friends who are named Matthew.) This cat's a native Vancouver Islander, former Place member, excellent writer, stellar (though retired?) poet and all-around wonderful, funny, smart guy. His most redeeming feature is being married to the lovely Shawna, who no longer sells Tupperware (though we thank her and praise her, for if my lunches are so handily and niftily carried, it is entirely thanks to her.) They are in the business of teaching English in Korea, and we miss them greatly, but now that Matt's got a blog, we shall miss them oh-so-slightly less.

Do go pay him a visit.