“She’s not going to go into labour while you’re away, right?” I asked dad about the cow in the dry-pen. I was proud to finally know cows were given a break after being pregnant eight months still while producing an unnatural amount of milk twice a day for humans to consume; they were given a month off from milking.

Of all the screens that command my attention, you are my greatest love. It was always thus. As a child, even when we didn’t have you of our own, I coveted the neighbours’ television. I dropped in to visit you them every morning before school and again when the bus dropped us at home. Through those visits, I learned so much from you: the best way to assess the value of the Showcase Showdown; important cultural references like “de plane, boss, de plane,” “Marsha, Marsha, Marsha;” that I’m not suited to daisy-dukes; what it is to be a cruise director, and that I would

Our ancestors would have been shocked at the way we transport food around. For our supermarkets, there is no longer “in season” produce. I gratefully eat leafy greens in January, knowing they’ve been imported from sunnier climes. I slice tomatoes for sandwiches in February, their colour foreshadowing their anemic taste. I eat the occasional avocado and pineapple year-round, despite our inability to grow them in Ontario.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about my red walls. I talked about how moving to my red-walled house was hard, but how once here, any alterations have been even harder. I’m the person who replaces the broken blow dryer with exactly the same model to save learning features of a new one; who wears things long after full presentability to avoid having to appreciate an update; who clings to 1990s CD technology because the ghetto blaster still works; and who pivoted so hard at the beginning of COVID,

Mirrored Time

Friday was a significant day for me. It was the first Friday the 13th of May since 2016, the year Jack and I took a risk on that fate-tempting day to elope. I gave you that story last May* when my years married equaled my years widowed.
When I was a kid, one issue of my Owl Magazine had an image of a microscopic view of the inside of a skin pore showing all the pus and mites and whatnot

For decades, mom and her hairdresser had as close a relationship as you can have. They met weekly for a wash and ‘set,’ a word that doesn’t even exist for most of us. Every six weeks, she’d have a perm. Generations of hairdressers’ children have been educated on mom’s dime. And no, for mom they are not called stylists. These are hairdressers located on plazas where you can park close enough to save your ‘do if it’s raining.

Every second Thursday, for the last two years, I await the text to let me know Foodshare has delivered their “Good Food Box, Produce, Small” to my porch. My heart is hardly pounding with excitement about it - it’s not Culinary Adventure Tours, my favourite gourmet food delivery service with boxes curated for every occasion. No, the Good Food Box (GFB) is as about as basic as you can get. Not organic, not necessarily local, but inexpensive, good produce from which I can make inexpensive, good healthy, food. Among many COVID games I play - wordle quordle octordle canuckle banagrams and so on - is using the GFB without letting it go bad (or going crazy from the monotony). I’ve amped this up in the last few months as food prices have risen dramatically.

I had the nicest text from a former articling student*. A lawyer, young in both in lawyer years and human years. (yes, lawyers think of themselves according to the number of years since their call to the bar, like the call itself is some kind of rebirth) She told me how she’d been writing something that called on skills she’d developed while she and I had worked together. She said she was grateful for the stuff I’d coached on her - you know, seemingly dumb stuff like how to format a letter but also