Undercover

It’s been too long! I’ve been neglecting this space, and I’ll admit to feeling a little sad about that.

I’ve got excellent excuses, though! Skip this next paragraph if you don’t want to hear them - I acknowledge the fact that I’m writing this part for me ;).

Let me begin with an understatement: October was a very busy month. Over the course of it, I made two trips back to Maison BLUM. First, for Thanksgiving, and then, again, at the tail end of the month, to plant the bulbs that should have arrived in time for Thanksgiving. (Those bulbs had a very good excuse for their tardiness, though: if you’ll recall, there was a long and important postal strike.) While in Toronto, I hosted five dinner parties including a fiction writer’s circle/duck banquet for twelve. Attended a poetry reading, a book launch, multiple dance classes. Hit up several dive bars and a wine bar and even an arcade. Went apple picking and, of course, to cap it all off, trick-or-treating.

I suppose that October felt like the right time, between September’s re-settling into our city routines and the chill we knew would soon settle over us all, to carpe diem the hell out of our social batteries. And I’m glad we did, and that October held us in her red-gold beauty, the unseasonably warm weather she gave us this year. But by the end of it, boy, was I tuckered out. So tired.

So I decided to go undercover for November.

Not fully undercover, and not completely tucked out of sight, under my covers, but to plan less and to rest more. To focus on rooting in to the novel I’m currently writing and the dancing that’s been filling my cup. To go sober for the month and allow my body to reset itself after the lush excitement of the long summer. To linger in the kitchen, stirring pots fragrant with good things from the final farmers’ markets. To get lost between the covers of a book. To spend hours in the library at Hart House, working out plot lines for my book in which a character named Lil also goes undercover, pretending to be a charismatic evangelical leader when in fact she is not - she’s an atheist running a modern-day underground railroad - and in the library, sometimes dozing off and dreaming that the ivy out the window is creeping in and covering me in a glossy green blanket, which one might want because it’s always too chilly at Hart House, despite the unholy clanking (think Marley’s chains!) of the century-old radiators.

It’s kind of like the little garden that’s growing in the old trunk on my patio, under a cover of polycarbonate “glass”, that improvised cold frame… everything is still growing, but at a slower rate, perhaps more mindfully. The cover protects the plants from the harshest of the elements, but it still lets the light in. That’s the kind of cover I’ve gone under for November. (PS - today’s the day Lu and I will harvest the tatsoi, arugula, radishes and mizuna from there. It’s supposed to snow tomorrow, but I think we’ll try to make the parsley last in there a little longer).

Going undercover for a while, once in a while, seems to me a necessary reset. There are times you need to file things away, put yourself in order. Funny that today, Lu and I are going up to Wychwood Park to pick up filing cabinets found on Facebook Marketplace. I’ll also be hanging some etchings, a Pamela Williams photograph, and a whiteboard in my office (I’m desperate to follow this hilarious writing advice by these guys).

I hope that you, gentle reader, are finding ways to relish the month of November, a month that we in the Northern Hemisphere tend to dread for its shorter days and cooler temperatures. Soon enough we’ll be throwing off the covers, dressing up in sparkly things and toasting to good cheer!

In view of this, a little reminder that if you’d like to force some bulbs for indoor scent and beauty over the holidays, now is the time! Lu and I will shortly be planting Paperwhite bulbs in a brass wastepaper bin. We’ll be using soil because we have a surplus right now in the cold frame, but next year I think we’ll try it this (most elegant!) way.

To close: a poem by Lisel Mueller, from her collection Alive Together.

Paper-White Narcissus

Strange, how they got their name—
a boy, barely a man,
looked into sunlit water
and saw himself so beautiful
he spent his life pursuing
that treacherous reflection.
There is no greater loneliness.

Here they are, risen
from the darkness of the pebbled pool
we have made for them in a dish—
risen and broken through
the long, green capsules
to show us their faces:

they are so delicate they invite
protection or violation,
and they are blind.