I’ve been thinking all my life about green and growing things and for weeks have wanted to see Wings of Desire for the millionth time just so I can hear the angel Damiel’s list of what he’s observed that day,

when twilight grass looks the way velvet feels or the way warm smooth metal can seem in a dream

when you sit outside in a day that’s almost night and the fireflies arrive

all the other places you never know in daylight open out to you

there in the glow

It’s crazy-hot here now and it’s not even June yet.

It’s still in my head, the image from a lot of years ago, the image that came to me one day when I was sad and angry and roiled with all the awfulness of what had happened, when my worklife had become void, when the job I loved had been lost to me by bad behaviour not my own. Smashworld came and I fell down until the moment I got up and thought to make my own way, which I did and am doing and will do.

If tomorrow I were to walk away to some other place, go live in a where that is not this where, the place I would go would have lots of snow and the house I would live in would be made of cold, a house of snow — or of-snow-adjacent.

I don’t know how it works, how to do the math, but it’s like every emotion I’ve ever felt somehow gets wrapped up in trees. Trees become some kind of conduit for thought and feeling, for understanding, for epiphany, for optimism, for love.

Oh. My. Goodness.

I like the notion of the skin being breached so that change can be rendered to the organism. I like the idea very much, altho’ I fully recognize the malarial reality of the wrong kind of puncture, the bleedout reality of the wrong kind of slice. But here in my metaphorical LaLaLand, sharp things are pretty things that are also agents of change.

This year, watching the Tour de France on TV, I heard one of the announcers say, “There’s the beautiful sunflower field” and it made me happy that, given all the manful muscling in the pelotonic tumult, he thought to mention that quiet golden place. Since then the words”There is the beautiful sunflower” have lodged themselves in my imagination in the inexplicable way certain words and phrases do from time to time, becoming something like a prayer or an offering or a streamer of solace unfurled the way a strand of birch bark can be freed from the tree.

Also?

Butcher’s charts take it all apart.

Sewing patterns put it all together.

The sundering and the reconciling … they interest me, both. I maybe love taxidermy because it requires both; I should maybe love the jigsaw puzzle more than I do, for the same reason.

Often I think of the poetry of objects
about the way a seam is resolved
or the way a spine grows
about the things we make with our bodies
and the bones from out of our bodies

Yellow! I don’t really like it, most of the time, and yet my favourite shoes in the whole wide world are yellow and I love it when a cool-toned garden is warmed by splashes of yellow and I think lemons are not only delightfully delicious  as foodstuffs but delightfully delectable in every aesthetic aspect and I like looking at my bookshelves and seeing the yellow spines of Upside Down and Cheap Chic and A Prick Up Your Ears and What It Is and maybe now that I think of it I do like yellow, not as the object or the subject, mostly, but in small illuminating punctuatory doses.

The world spins on its axis, on and on and on, no matter who comes here or leaves here, no matter how happy or sad you are, no matter, no matter.

Actually … actually … I’m a very bling-averse woman.

Ice is nice. Okay, if you’re me, it’s more than nice.

I run. I like to run, a lot.

Correction.

I love to run. Love it, with big crazy heartsing heartpound loveness.

Blue-and-white china is a lovely thing indeed. I have rarely seen any that I did not like, at least a bit, at least the colour scheme if not the pattern. Because while green is queen, blue is definitely her consort, and the consort’s most worthy consort is white.

If you take away my periodic PMS madness and my 92%-of-the-time short fuse, I’m a pretty fun gal.

If I said I loved you, what would you say?

It’s the space between the leaves that makes me shiver, that makes me cry, that makes me need to bow my head.

Why? Because in the words of John Hejduk, “I believe in the density of the sparse.”

And here we are, arrived at the day on which Canadians give thanks. Truth be told, I did my Tgiving dinner yesterday and it featured poulet not dinde, but this is the official holiday so I will honour it and break my illness-induced silence by typing some words for you all.

Three is a delicious number. De.Li.Cious. In general, I would say that odd numbers are far nummier than evens (and all numbers — every last mother’s son of ‘em — are better than four, which is an evil number of death and brussels sprouts and clowns that come for you in the night).

I went to Ikea a couple of weeks ago with my friend Allysun. It was delightful, as trips to Ikea can be when you’re not there to make some big significant purchase (cos let’s face it, there’s more than a little truth to the old “Ikea: Swedish for ‘Out of Stock’” joke.) But this was a fun outing, no pressure, just cruise around with a friend, have a yammer, and enjoy the Ikean spectacle.

It’s not terribly often I say this but

when i am a tree i will wear these rings