Good morning! It’s very nice to see you. I hope you had a great week.
I’m moving a little slower than usual this morning, so we’ve swapped out our usual cups of tea for mugs of coffee. It’s hot, it’s strong, it’s keeping me alive.
Looky, I’ve poured one for you too. There’s cream and sugar on the table.
Let’s catch up.
This is a movement
We’re working in a bit of reverse order this week. Normally I save my picked-up spikes for the end, but I thought I’d shake things up.
My work has a monthly newsletter, which, among all the other content, features a short Q&A from a different employee every month. My month was last month.
The last question was something like “what’s your motto?”, and I didn’t hesitate. I wrote, “Pick up every spike.”
I knew most people wouldn’t get the reference, but some would. It also gave me the opportunity to explain it to the several people who reached out to clarify what the heck I meant. If I see a bit of pointy metal on the ground that might end up in someone’s tire, I pick it up. Not much more to it than that, other than the 8 or so flat tires I’ve had in the last decade.
I still love when people send me photos of screws and nails they’ve picked up as they walk around in the course of a day. This is, as we say, a movement.
And bread
We hosted another Make Stuff Monday this past week. Every few weeks we put on a big pot of chili (or other simple, shareable meal) and invite a bunch of friends over for Monday evening where they don’t have to make supper and we can hang out and make stuff.
It’s always interesting to see what stuff gets made every week. I think most everyone brings some sort of handcraft to work on, but sometimes a group project emerges. This week, our friend Kristopher had a great idea to create a wall hanging out a beloved old T-shirt, but he needed some help with the sewing machine to make it happen. At one point, we had five people in the dining room gathered around the sewing machine, chatting and helping and teaching and making.
Our other friend Lindsey had a great idea to make some props for one of her favourite back-yard/beach games. She needed a way to anchor strips of fabric to the ground so they’d not blow away or get kicked, and I asked if she’d ever used grommets before.
She hadn’t! Which meant I got to teach her how to install grommets.
I wish I’d taken a photo of my little grommet kit, because installing these little bad boys is one of my favourite jobs. A kit costs less than 10 bucks at Canadian tire and requires only a hammer to finish up. I ran to the shed to grab my kit and we played on the deck installing grommets in scraps of fabric for a while.
We kept things simple for the meal to appeal to everyone’s tastes. I made a couple loaves of sourdough bread, and we put out a bunch of veggies and snacky things. I’ve moved out of my sesame seed phase with my bread and started making a single long score straight down the middle of an oval loaf. The results are always so satisfying, if a little more rustic than some of the fancier scoring patterns I’ve tried.
The evening ended with some of us making music in the living room. Our pal Rowan turns out to be the exact fourth voice we needed to round out the trio of Alice, Jane, and me. There was a moment when I heard Rowan’s harmony chime in on Peter, Paul, and Mary’s “500 Miles”, and I was so overcome with joy, I accidentally shouted an expletive.
Anywho. Make Stuff Monday is always a little more work to put together than we intend, but it’s always worth it.
Mindy unpacks (again)
I decided to take a week off of writing Dunnock Bay, so I could catch up on a few things. My little serial fiction is now 21 chapters deep with more than 130 pages of writing. I love writing and sharing it, and I love that it feels like I’m slowly filling the pages of an inevitable book.
I didn’t want to leave the feed empty, so I took the opportunity to re-introduce Dunnock Bay to newer readers, or to readers who joined sometime in the last few months. I re-issued the very first entry when we met Mindy the librarian as she arrived in her new hometown. I hope you enjoy.
Poetry in the woods
A few months back, I told you about a poetry night we attended at our friends’ house. We had so much fun, one of the attendees promised to host a special afternoon of poetry in the woods near her house, and that magical day ended up being yesterday.
We were directed to the spot by way of a pin dropped in a google map at the head of a trail on a red dirt road. A sign at the trail head indicated we were at the right spot, so we hiked for a while, until we were greeted by a couple of friendly dogs who led us the rest of the way to a clearing beside a cold, spring-fed creek.
We knew less than half of the faces gathered there in the woods, but that didn’t seem to matter much once people started sharing poetry. Some read their own work. Some read the poems of others.
I didn’t have a poem of my own to read this time. When it came my turn, I said I’ve always considered myself a writer, but never a poet. I also mentioned my mind has a bit of difficulty discerning the difference between prose and poetry, and I have finally decided it comes to a difference in intent. Writing poetry is a deliberate act with all sorts of different goals, but the primary one seems to be “to write a poem.”
Some of my favourite poems are when the poet seems to be having fun with words. My earliest memories of having real fun with words was writing Mad Libs as a kid, so I decided we should do that. I turned a Byron poem (yes, that one) into a Mad Lib, and I thought it worked rather well.
It was a terrific way to spend an afternoon, black flies be damned. We paused the poetry for several minutes to listen to a pair of barred owls sing back and forth to each other "(Who cooks for youuuuuu?” “No, who cooks for YOOOOOOOOU?”).
Might I recommend making friends with poets? You’ll find yourself having the most wonderful adventures.
Well, looky there. We did it again and let the time get away from us. There’s a whole Sunday to be lived.
Thanks for hanging out with me this morning. I’ll chat with you again next week.