V. July 2020: Quarantined on a Canadian Isle
As any hoarder worth their weight in accumulated chattels will understand, one should always have several dozen eggs in the fridge at any given moment. Every Friday morning, we retrieve eggs and honey from a small family farm’s porch on another finger of the lake. They have a tiny on-your-honor stand, which sells out earlier and earlier as the days get warmer and warmer, summer residents opening their houses and day-trippers making the trek from Ottawa or Toronto. Now sailing the outer islands of middle age, the pair moved from British Columbia with their children several years ago, building out the small yet highly productive garden, complete with handsome sheds made from corten and corrugated metals. We occasionally yell greetings to them or their flock of chickens and even had a distanced tour of their garden and the pond near the house, the water level creeping downward with each passing day. We chat about the lack of water and soil on the island, where the virus spikes are in Ontario, the underestimated undertaking to build their home. Their son, now a man, produces seasonal honey, some of the finest I’ve ever spooned. The nine-year-old twin granddaughters sell pots of herbs they started from seed, saving money to purchase a loom.
The only time I lie to my wife is about the amount of dairy I use. My edible subterfuge, our weekly frittata, comprises their eggs and whatever else can be foraged in the woods or at the farm stand. A baking dish is spread with a light (lie) coating of salted butter and layered with sliced Linzer potatoes, squash blossoms, kale wilted in leek and garlic, and a smattering (lie) of shaved Pecorino Romano. The whole savory trifle is smothered in eggs whipped with just a touch (yet another lie) of cream and baked until golden and bubbling.
A hipster with a thick beard
in an electric car
branded with the words’ zero-emission.’
chugging on a vape pen
spewing smoke out the window.
We’re all so full of shit.
My wife claims
the Mayan calendar
her cycles of change
every 12 years,
but this serpent’s skin
no longer snug
in half that time
welcomed transformation
striving for new.
But the older me
petrified of the cliff,
paralyzed at the threshold
of tiny houses
with fewer things.
Go into anyone’s quarters
look at the books
know who they are,
or at least,
who they aspire to be.
Thousands of titles
to be culled,
many spines not yet cracked,
next to the bed, the bath,
the leather lounge chair.
Will I re-read Joan Didion?
Will I ever read Anna Karenina?
Will I build a straw bale house?
Or compose Charlie Trotter’s unagi terrine?
My ego
identity
sense of self
tied like a bowline
to a carefully curated life
impossible to untie
while bearing the load
of belongings.
The well ran dry. I kid you not. Not a drop out of any faucet, nor a flush to be had. The caretaker came to the house. From the end of the driveway, he explained the well often goes dry. He said he thought we had a 25-foot deep well, but it seems it’s only 15-feet in heels. It’s literally called a shallow well and is composed of surface water. Gross. Dumbfounded, I’d watched that old man make a show of measuring the well many times, taking measurements on a stick he jimmied, marking it on the side of the shed in a counting system as mysterious as the abacus. A water truck would need to be called, siphoning its chlorinated contents into the well. He’d need access to the house to prime the pump and check the filtration system each time the well went dry, once a month or more in the drier months. He finished by saying we were just lucky it didn’t happen earlier this year, but we’d had a lot of rain.
Nobody said a word about the well running dry when we agreed to purchase the house. Indeed, we had been told it had recently been cleaned, muck and sediment removed. It was in writing that it was adequate. A few remedial inquiries illuminated the vast difference between a dug well, the kind we had, and a drilled well. Drilled wells use machinery to bore a hole 60 feet or more into the Earth to pump out water. By comparison, dug wells are kiddie pools, usually from 15–30 feet. By virtue of depth, the water coming from a drilled well is more desirable. There’s more of it, and it can be less contaminated from surface run-off. There’s an ornate UV filtration system for all of the water coming into the house from the well, but the owners advised us not to drink it ‘out of an abundance of caution.’ In my wife’s mind, that was a red flag for ‘don’t even brush your teeth with it.’
Unsustainable to not have access to water, we knew we would need to have a well drilled. A dozen well companies were called. Not one company had availability for more than a year. Belatedly, we were told this island is one of the driest in all of Ontario. Coming from drought-ridden California, this was not good news. Finally, I spoke with Chris, a soft-spoken, well driller and water whisperer from off-island, who agreed to make the trek to walk the property to assess water availability.
Nathalie and her husband left Quebec City to start an organic farm on this island. Underneath a green awning faded from the summer sun, they lay out a wobbly table piled with onions, eggs, and strawberries. She’s as elegant in bearing as most Frenchwomen, but her wide smile and dirt-under-the-fingernails earthiness are pure Nord Americain. The berries are small and sweet-tart and perfumed of summer dresses and stained fingertips.
Rinsing each berry of garden dust, we stand at the sink ripping fruit from stem with our teeth like hungry bears in early spring. The few remaining berries are roasted low and slow with balsamic vinegar and jarred; this blast of summer judiciously spooned atop our morning yogurt. Half a flat is never enough.
During our last visit to San Francisco in February to lunch with an old friend, it took us more than an hour and a half to drive from our home, located less than 15 miles away. The traffic in the Bay Area is a soul suck. Driving by enormous encampments, the homelessness in Berkeley and San Francisco is heartbreaking and Mad Max-pervasive. Yet, our chicken lunch for three was just shy of a Midwest mortgage payment. Instead of rolling the dice on a now common car robbery (in local parlance, a smash n’grab), we opted for a parking lot. But instead of broken window glass, we returned to four junkies smoking crack behind our car, not far from piles of human feces.
In May, more than 52% of small businesses in the leisure and hospitality sector reported temporarily closing, and 35.2% reported a decrease in the number of paid employees. Many of these businesses will never re-open. How are these people, many already living from paycheck to paycheck, going to survive? The service industry is a lifeline for Black and Latino workers, women, and young persons. Seventy percent of U.S. metropolitan regions have at least 10% of their workforce in leisure and hospitality.
When you step back from the horror of our current predicament, you can just make out the fuzzy edges of its roots: the groaning weight of inequality, disregard for our food sources, the planet’s quickening degradation solely for our gain, trust seceded to the untrustworthy, to the greedy, to the banal.
Even as the thunderstorm passes,
the skies blue to elephant gray
and back again,
it continues to rain in the forest,
a symphony of droplets played
as if by Mendelssohn
from leaf to leaf
petal to petal
sheath to sheath
reverberating long after the heavens clear.
Take-aways from new lessons are hard-won. The only way to rid the now shredded tomato plants of the tomato hornworm (Manduca quinquemaculata) is to pluck them off the plant. With your hands. Eventually budding into the handsome five-spotted hawk moth, a brown and gray pollinator, its fugly caterpillar is the size of my bloated middle finger (sadly, now tired from continually standing straight up), and truly digs said host plant. But the tink-tink noise they make as they’re lobbed into a corroded aluminum coffee can is nothing short of Chopin.
Or even Bobby.
It was a rookie move to plant a garden, especially so soon after arriving. Without a clear understanding of the climate, the seasons, and the abundant production of the area’s small farms, it would have made more sense to wait. But sinking my hands in Earth is always a grounding exercise, and ensuring we had nuts for winter overshadowed any logic, as the world was now illogical to me.
In all my years of fine local eating, in New York or the Bay Area, in France, northern England, or even Italy, Prince Edward County is my most intensely hyper-local experience. No shopping in markets or stores means peeling back the layers of this community to its studs, finding the small producers of good food and drink, of which there are many. An on-your-honor farm stand just up the county road collaborates with several producers. Stocked late spring through mid-autumn, the creaky stand groans under the weight of baskets filled with spinach and kale, sprouting onions from the winter crop, and just harvested green garlic. Mushrooms grown in the basement of a nearby farmhouse are displayed with their names and attributes, the frilly fronds of Lion’s Mane resting near to pink and white and blue oyster mushrooms, as sexual as any Georgia O’Keeffe. There are cakes and pies and macaroons made by Cindy, a former pastry chef from Alberta, who checked out of city life and bought the B&B across the road from the stand. In addition to the sweets, she makes round loaves of rye bread each week, the wheat supplied by a nearby farm. And when I’m feeling indulgent, which is always, we’ll leave with one of her lemon-poppy seed pound cakes. Thickly sliced with black coffee, it makes the perfect elevenses, or even again at 2 pm.
Abutting the stand is a banged-up chest freezer stocked with various cuts of the farm’s goat meat and frozen dough for biscuits and breads. But on a stifling, humid afternoon, the cooling treasure is to be found at the bottom of the whirring freezer: homemade ice-cream sandwiches made with a scoop of vanilla and a generous ladle of caramel pressed between two slabs of brownie. Split between us, this afternoon jolt of sugar never has the opportunity to drip onto the floor of our house a mere couple of minutes up the road, the wax paper wrappers littering the backseat of the car.
I often think of that quote attributed to Sinatra: “I feel sorry for people who don’t drink because when they wake up, that’s the best they’re gonna feel all day.” Aside from a more-than-occasional joint, he’s correct.
Reminding myself that if I’m able to keep a sunhat on my head and drink one less glass with my evening repast, I’ll stand a shot of resembling a woman in the neighborhood of my age, instead of that tired old woman in the neighborhood. Aging well both inside and out requires discipline. I’m more of a hedonist. But unless we’re seated in a good dining room or around a table with friends, I don’t drink that much anymore. I still have a few hundred bottles of wine collected during my years as a Sommelier, and most of what remains are pretty fancy (the silly notion of saving the good stuff). Not drinking means I’m less bloated physically and mentally, having lost far too many mornings fighting through the dull fog of a hangover. It also doesn’t agree with my menopause. Last whisky binge found me wide awake at 3:00 am, the new, carefully researched linen sheets thoroughly sweated through. My wife, never a big drinker, reminded me when we were first together, I opened a bottle of wine to accompany a full-on dinner every night. And I was initially opposed to curbing either. Now it’s more often broth and greens and tea. Having difficulty even contemplating how our country raise our foods and animals, I’ve not eaten inside the industrial system in many years. Instead, I spend more and more of my time gardening and foraging for both edibles and silence.
Within nature, my voice is heard by my heart, creativity breathes, and our innate individuality is woven into the planet’s vibrant fabric. Living amongst others in densely populated sub-urbanity, my humanity wanes. I often have difficulty grasping, even glimpsing the genuine notions of compassion, empathy. My puerile efforts to do so are too often made while sitting in judgment, with eyes wide and mouth agape. There are so many people now, noisily clamoring for attention in ways sometimes grotesque. The crowded ugliness suffocates. But arriving at the edge of Lake Ontario moments before sunset accompanied by the soulful horn of Miles Davis, I’m the only one on Earth. The sky changes with each passing moment, reflecting off the darkening lake, the glistening granite now saturated in pastels. Vigor and peace are restored while watching dusk negotiate terms with day and night; its flamboyant hues those found in a child’s watercolor.
The older I become, the more I return to the notion that race, religion, and nationality are preoccupations we can no longer afford. Instead, our humanity needs to be our new orthodoxy, ministering to nature, rectifying environmental degradation to save our planet.
Hiking in the woods all day, I didn’t see another soul. While I’m certainly no extrovert, I fear my tolerance for others has decreased. My social skills during this period of isolation continue to rust, corroding into reclusiveness. Days and days may pass without interacting with anyone other than my wife. The unannounced ‘pop-by’ is big in this small community, this small, glass-wrapped house providing few nooks in which to hide. Even in the best of pre-pandemic circumstances, it can take me a day or two to work myself up for a visit, trading in my sarong or flannel pants for a linen frock and a slick of lipstick. Now, in addition to the psychological preparation for mixing with others, the health hazards of being in close proximity stymie any desire to socialize.
There are more than 3,000 species of stick bugs in various climes around the globe. Depending upon the region, they have evolved (remember science?) to resemble a twig or branch from their habitat to fool predators (birds, bats, reptiles, and spiders enjoy feasting on the adults). The delicate creatures are herbivores, their digestive tracks breaking down tough leaves, their droppings tasty, nutritious treats for various bugs. Half of me is enthralled; the other half has the willies. Mother Nature never fails to exhibit each being’s complete interconnection, often pulling me back from the brink of misanthropic bitterness.
Wang Yangming (1472–1529) wrote in his Inquiry on the Great Learning:
“The great man regards Heaven and Earth and the myriad things as one body. He regards the world as one family and the country as one person. As to those who make a cleavage between objects and distinguish between self and others, they are small men. That the great man can regard Heaven, Earth and the myriad things as one body is not because he deliberately wants to do so, but because it is natural to the humane nature of his mind that he do so.”
The box arrived this morning,
by smiling delivery man
ear pressed to cardboard,
as if listening
for the voice of Mother Nature herself.
Opened with care and curiosity,
thousands of ladybugs
crawled from their burlap travel satchel
into raised garden beds
thick with leaves and vines
to gorge on the wicked aphid
now besmirching treasured tomatoes.
A militaristic raid
performed by a tiny army
camouflaged
in red and black polka dots.
Backyard warrior.
No guts, no glory.
I got stoned this afternoon on the back porch and cut off my hair in the reflection of the window. I’d grown impatient with my ragamuffin, graying ponytail that screamed quarantined-old-lesbian-on-the-lam. Instead, I’ve been feeling more akin to Mia Farrow, a la Rosemary’s Baby: flitting between giddiness and madness, deeply suspicious of the cult in power, and sure that both Sinatra and Polanski were manipulative cruel fucks.
Paying more attention to cloud formations overhead than creating clean lines against my jaw, the haircut suited my mood of late: ragged, without style, and a little nutty. As shorn fistfuls of hair blew into the woods, I comforted myself, knowing it would be upcycled as nesting materials against the impending winter cold.
Indeed, who doesn’t miss a good wash, cut, blow out, a mani-pedi, an adjustment, a massage, and sampling cheese at the counter? But these activities ain’t on the docket at the moment. My long-suffering wife stifled a chuckle and a lecture, took the scissors from my hands, and once again, salvaged me.
So tonight, we’re having the good stuff. On my way out the door departing California, I grabbed the last few cans of tuna from the pantry and tucked them into the car. Tipped off years ago from a read-lead about Katy’s Smokehouse on California’s Lost Coast in Trinidad, we bought a couple of cans of their albacore tuna, hand-packed and sashimi grade. “95% re-order rate,” boomed the deaf old man behind the counter, his sales technique that of an angry battering ram. But the old man was right. We returned for more. The distinctive yellow wrap with retro, block lettering announcing the contents instantly perks the mood. One hoarded, precious can of Katy’s was mixed with a few lovage leaves, gray shallot, homemade mayo, and pickled jalapeños from a successful batch, and all tucked into first-of-the-season bitter radicchio leaves. With black truffle potato chips and a farmhouse ale, I could almost ignore my hillbilly haircut.
The road to Wapoos harbor is lined in neon color, the flowers reminding me of my mother. Growing up on Cape Cod, hollyhocks bloomed in early summer along a side of the house, against a fieldstone wall. Each year without fail, my mother would cut one of the deeply colored flowers and a seedpod from the long stem and attach the two with a pin. The upside-down flower became Cinderella’s ball gown, and wide eyes and a rounded mouth were penned onto the green head, making her appear astonished at her new fairytale life.
So much of life is the luck of the draw, a game of chance. Unbeknownst to me as a child, and fully unappreciated by me as a teen, I was dealt a fine hand. Growing up on an insular (read: white, waspy, wealthy) sandy peninsula, I graduated from Catholic school with only fifty classmates. Sacred Heart’s monochromatic rainbow comprised shades of Catholic: second or third-generation Italians, Irish, or Eastern European. There was one Black girl who transferred out in sixth grade. Our world was small. I now realize this was in keeping with my parent’s world view. The victors write the history books, the spoils divided among the oblivious. A second-generation immigrant, my father would make occasional comments about people who looked and lived differently. Perhaps his father did the same. He wasn’t a ranter, the words uttered in a low voice, his chin tilted downwards as if imparting some hushed wisdom. Living in The Big City in my early 20s, I thought it made me sound cool and worldly to repeat these sentiments casually. It didn’t. I was called out by a friend’s spouse for my ignorance, for my shite behavior. One of my most humiliating moments, it continues to provoke profound shame. I still cringe at its recollection.
The new world order will look differently; the old model no longer sustainable. The uprising for racial and gender equality is heartening. The United States’ treatment of Blacks and Native Americans has always been appalling, no matter which century you’re from. This huge blemish is finally coming to a big, messy head that will require more than a superficial squeeze. Before thoughtful healing can begin, there needs to be an accounting of our role in the horrors of both past and present. Minorities no longer are, no matter how many times the census is gerrymandered, and women are stepping into their rightful places.
Good Lord, it’s hot and humid here. And the ginormous mosquitoes, lovingly referred to as the Provincial Bird of Manitoba, cast shadows on window screens in the early evening. Trapped inside for the hour before and after sunset, thoughts turn to food and booze.
With baby squash still attached, flowers are gently filled with a mash-up of sheep’s milk feta from a flock with a handsome keeper and minced Genovese basil leaves of which any Ligurian would be proud. We added toasted pine nuts, a couple of eggs, and crumb made from rock-hard rye loaves; the dried heels slowly collected and bagged like unusual stones from Lake Ontario’s shoreline. Dressed with olive oil and enough garlic to ward off intruders (winged or otherwise), the veggies are roasted quickly in a hell-hot oven.
Standing at the screen door sipping a Canadian whisky, watching the sun drop behind the cypress, I imagine the anxious longing of the flying pests hovering just outside; the humidity, the horrors of the daily news, and the scent of frying garlic driving us all mad.
