Day in the Life

Some writers begin their work with a prayer, and some turn off their Wi-Fi. Others enter the flow when the kids are sleeping. Like Sylvia Plath, like so many women. There are authors who start with the last sentence, which feels God-like and scary. Some, like me, share their work widely along the way and there are those who don’t let anyone read a sentence until it’s published. We’re always different animals.

I start early, take many breaks, and munch on assorted salted nuts while sipping strong coffee. A candle is lit, usually a three-wicked cheapy from the grocery store, and I try to let the thoughts bloom. They tap me on the shoulder while I’m on the toilet and make me pause while pulling open the fridge door. Remember me, they say. Make room for me.

I look out the window a lot, and must add roofs, cedar trees, and squirrels to the acknowledgements section. Into the baroque flower wallpaper on my phone’s home screen, I’ve typed : “MY BOOK HAS A DESTINY.” Things from inside my head take shape on the page like a fishbone. Ribs of ideas and tails of tales. It’s invisible magic, and I have much to learn.

Like how to better skin my stories and loosen the red meat from what covers it. Show not tell, and don’t be so concrete. Let the birds inside sing. The ones who flutter their wings when the memories return, and my mouth tastes like rust. Sometimes I feel lost. So many swooshes of black cloth with just enough light for the readers to make it out. Is it a cape or a shroud? Maybe it’s a hooded sack.

***

A maroon mini-van pulls up in front of my house, with unrecognizable but loud music blaring inside. A basic guy in glasses bops his head up and down to the beat while squinting into the morning sun. He doesn’t see me crouched down next to the white hydrangea; my floral frenemy whose ambition threatens to overtake the order I’m trying to establish in the front yard. The little weeds come out easy after the rain.

I then rise and assume the homeowner stance, peering at him incredulously as if to say: ‘You there, what are you doing in front of my house?’ The guy at the wheel looks at me for a second then faces straight ahead, like you do when you want to pretend what just happened didn’t. A few more seconds of meaningless awkward pass before a young man crosses the street and runs up to the driver.

He pulls open the back door and hops into the van. A sexy smile creeps across my face as I put the pieces together.  His crisp white t-shirt looks just like the one worn by the other young guy I observed leaving my neighbour’s house last week, also quite early in the morning. But that guy had his own car. Do the people next door or beside my house see this? Do they see me?

They might think the hippie prince in the Subaru only comes over every now and then because that’s what she wants. The woman who bought that house by herself, who freely orders Amazon products and keeps upgrading her home. But they don’t know how often I travel to his beautiful place, which I sometimes clean and stock with ice cream and gifts.

I want to keep licking his fingers in the dark. I want him to feel and to see that I’m worth it. Several months ago, I carried an orange toothbrush in my purse and nervously asked if I could leave it. It’s travelled from the downstairs bathroom, where it lived alone in a long stiff drawer, to the top floor bathroom drawer where it lays next to the black hairbrush. A plastic X in the territory of love.  

I’d like to see him more and I like things just as they are. Pacing is hard for women who usually charge through because of fear and a history of being reduced to sex. I’m scared to open the topic of we, and for now basking in his sunshine is glorious. It comes strong, like his golden limbs and hair that winds its way around my mouth. Sometimes I find it in my body after we part, his X.

He writes stories too. The pages begin with the singsong alarm at 6.10 am and as he puts earth into earth, they fill with life. And beauty, which he brings to each job and each time I ask him to tell me the plant name in Latin. Just looking at his pretty mouth turns me to jelly and by the time the scientific syllables leave his lips I’m done.

I tell my friend that what he does is creation. She pauses and says: “Your voice sounds calm when you talk about him.” That feels good. We look ahead as the car plods through the poorly synchronized lights and past the sunburned homeless people, towards the art gallery, towards beauty.

It’s not a happy cry. It comes from below the surface, where the ovens line up for us. They do that. But the oven isn’t simply about the end or quitting the violence of Ted and illness that led her there. The oven is about her fight for herself and the love for her children. She made sure the towels placed at each door opening were wet and tightly wedged to absorb the gas. It was down to that, and she made the call in her 30^th year, to leave.

I cry for that more than the light of creativity snuffed out too soon. What she gave us will last- it’s enough. 

I don’t stay long in front of 23 Fitzroy Road, unremarkable among the other brick row houses except for the blue heritage plaque next to the front door. The plaque doesn’t have her name on it, however, because Yeats lived there first and it’s one of the reasons Sylvia wanted to move there. Imagine the energy in that mortar, housing two of the greatest poets of the 20^th century. It feels like a man’s house, darkish and utilitarian in design. 

The lavender place just down the hill at 3 Chalcot Square pulls me in, with its first floor wooden façade and white decorative window frames. There’s a patch of green across the way and the candy coloured recency era homes press closely together like sisters. It feels right, and it’s no wonder she was so productive here. Between the ages of 27-28 she published her first volume of poetry, wrote The Bell Jar, and gave birth to her daughter Frieda. 

At 27 I move from the island of Newfoundland to the prairie province of Manitoba. Heartbroken and surviving on student loans, I begin my Ph.D. while living in an old man’s basement. A few months into the program I learn that my admission hung on the slightest of strings, which terrifies and ignites me. I can’t wait to shoot through the sky. Walking through the boring suburban landscape to and from the bus stand I know I will and that this is all temporary. None of it is me. 

Two provinces and a million hangovers later, I’m sitting in a darkened room getting “rough magic” tattooed on the top of my right foot. It’s the title of Paul Alexander’s biography of Sylvia Plath that I hungrily lap up and clutch to my bony chest, defeated by cigarettes and the tired breath I am living. After another toxic weekend of hillbilly love and loud noises that stretched far too late into the night, I need this ink. 

Like Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest who says: “This rough magic I here abjure”, I am reaching my limits and the myth of the magic bottle is drying up. When is it ever fun anymore?

Sylvia cites seeing a performance of The Tempest with her family, at the age of 8, as one of her intellectual awakenings. The play is also where she draws the name for the signature poem that would cast her moon everywhere, Ariel. The airy spirit eventually released by Prospero; Ariel was also the name of a horse that Plath used to ride in Devon. Both of them, Sylvia, even me, we gallop towards the silver freedom that hangs in the ancient sky and lights up every syllable from woman’s mouth. 

Sylvia is a wishbone. Woman, eternal. We long to ingest her creaky marrow through book spines, glass-enclosed archives, and fan girl writings. Her blood, her desire, it’s ours. This is another reason I cry when I think of her. Six decades later and we are still damned. Like her we know it and we ache for the balm and the bombs we need to blow open our own holes, over and over again. We can use Sylvia’s bone-books only because she wrote so much and so so well, from the inventive juvenilia to the ferocious journals to the doubled-over destiny of Tulips and Lady Lazarus at the end. 

She wrote to live, and her story is ours to follow. She is everything and we are too. Women who spin through the dusty cosmos and into the future leaving trails of light not just for others to follow, but for us to see and marvel in. Our brightness. This is forever. I will always cry when I think of Sylvia, the woman who wrote this in her journal on January 4, 1958:

Rooms. Every room a world. To be god: to be every life before we die: a dream to drive men mad. But to be one person, one woman-to live, suffer, bear children & learn others lives & make them into print worlds spinning like planets in the minds of other men.

Every time I lean against the kitchen counter or make a slow move to grab something from the closet, I am grateful. I feel heavy and grounded and light and spacious. Even when my mind is doing a frightening array of tasks at the same time, whirring speedily, I know I have the space for it. Haven’t left the house for days? It’s ok. Can’t remember the last time I had a bath? It’s ok. New veins on my face? It’s ok. 

No one will see me that often. And it so happens that sometimes, after a face mask or exceptionally good nap, the lines puff out for an afternoon of smiles and sweets. They lay a bit closer to the bone later on, but that’s ok. I’m not putting on a show or wanting to look different than I do, necessarily. I’m just talking about the way I see myself and the joys I have in keeping it inside. 

I’m not hiding, I’m manifesting.

I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve sat on my semi-clean area rug in the living room, with art and cats around me, awake in my evolution. Sometimes I’m crying, sometimes I’m reeling with happiness bent over a book that has just pushed open something new. Sometimes, I’m jotting keen notes about a paper on the back of a red envelope from a Valentine’s Day card. 

The world is everywhere, and I am too. I bring them together with my hands and my synapses and my daydreaming. I love to daydream.

Almost three years after receiving the funds for a research study about sexual cultures at Western University, I submitted the first peer-reviewed paper. It’s a powerful analysis of how sexual terminologies among undergrad students capture a series of intersecting issues related to sexual and gender-based violence: LGBTQ2IA+ marginalization, cultural appropriation, bro culture, and institutional neglect. A former student assisted with the paper, and we submitted it to the journal Sex Education.

I’m working on another one about safety, which I’ll keep quiet about for now. It’s going to be a heavy hitter too. We were interviewed, me and my student-author, by a journalist who is writing a story for Maclean’s magazine about rape culture on campus. It was so therapeutic to share our experiences with her and it felt so good to be listened to. Unlike the debacle in September and the horrible aftermath following the assaults, including being ignored STILL by the co-leaders of the taskforce. 

Releasing this paper into the reviewer ether was hard and hard-fought. I wonder whose inbox the editor delivered it to? I have no clue who will read it, but I know it’s strong and it will make a difference, especially to the students who know how much I care about them. 

Doing this work feels so good and is a lot to carry.

After pressing send I sort of caved into myself while doing some stretches on my yoga mat. I was listening to “What is this Love” by Blue Rodeo, featuring Sarah McLaughlin. Girls—the species who love to listen to sad songs when they’re feeling sad! It never ends. As I cradled my wet hands in my face, the two cats came up to me immediately. Elliott rubbed her pudgy orange self into my vulnerability and Jhona wound his long black tail around my swollen heart. 

“I’m not sad” I told them softly, but I sort of felt sad, actually. The sense of letting go can feel like a loss, even though it lightens the load and creates space for new, sometimes better energies. The sadness is also linked with the album this song is from- Five Days in July (1993). We saw Blue Rodeo many times, often a few sheets to the wind and sometimes on funny fungi. I remember being in the park by the river, so close, and watching them climb up the humble little staircase onto the stage. 

They looked a bit stoned, and I wondered if they thought Saskatoon was a bumpkin place compared to their mecca of Toronto.

I heard years later that they envisioned this album as being a reply to or their own version of Neil Young’s sound. A passing of the golden bough. I remember that one guy who played all these songs for me in his 6^th floor apartment, complete with a black bear skin on one wall and curios from the arctic. He’d also play them on the phone in the days we still talked and in the days we still talked on phones that were attached to our homes, not our hips. 

He is from the past, and it’s ok. Hearing these songs always pulls up a cache of heavy and meaningful memories, the kind that timestamp my life as a woman growing up, uncertain but strong, very wild but also brave. It’s my own Mariana Trench. Like that crescent shape on the ocean floor, the deepest spot in the earth- those songs, that time, those men, the mistakes, the pleasures, the many lessons- they are my depth and my geography. 

What is this dream that I’ll never find?
What is this prayer that’s stealing my mind?
What is this deal that I’ve just made with fate?
And I wonder if I have left it too late

I think we all have these albums, people, and threads of who we were saved and stored and secreted away in our laptops, old drawers of things, and the inside doors at the end of the yesterday’s hallway. It’s ok. 

Sabbaticals are twelve golden ticket months that appear in the academic calendar once every seven years. It’s when we get to focus on research, personal development, graduate students, and writing. Travel to a sister institution or to work with colleagues in different parts of the world is often part of these venerated breaks from the regular grind of teaching, administration, and a tonne of other work. On my last sabbatical, I travelled to India, Brasil, and a few other places. That seems like a mirage now.

Instead of jostling down New York’s 5^th Avenue to see what’s showing at the Guggenheim or melting in admiration at the interior design of an 18^th century Sicilian church, I’ve been tethered to my home. Covid has done this, of course. However, I do not hate my pandemic life and have actually been loving many of these quiet days. It’s my year of living creatively I tell people. 

Notes are jotted all over my TO DO list on the fridge, which has morphed from a neat vertical row of tasks into a crazy avalanche of coloured words, checkmarks, and arrows. Ideas are scrawled on sticky notes and the books I keep ordering form themselves into towers of inspiration all over the house. These are the places I’ve travelled.

I’m taking Anne Lamott’s genius advice to heart and have been writing down whatever pops into my head. Either I’ll find a place for it in the memoir(s) to come, in an article, or maybe I won’t ever use it. The point is to give the craft space and also to practice storytelling. It looks effortless on the pages of the authors who know what they’re doing but trust me when I say it’s hard. I love it though. 

On the Edge of Town

Memories of time spent in the home of my Grandpa and Grandma Mooney, my mom’s parents, have been populating my mind lately. Throughout my childhood we would gather there for Christmas and summer family gatherings. Their house was small, maybe 1100 square feet, but it had tremendous depth. Most of it was coloured in browns and welcoming floral patterns that seemed to make the space stretch and look richer than it was. When everyone else was outside or downstairs, I’d tip-toe past the rattly china cabinet and into the immaculate top floor rooms that were filled with lacquered bedroom sets and exotic religious icons.

Doing this felt like a sacred secret. As I touched the gold picture frames and neatly laid hair brushes with their matching hand mirrors, I was feeling the history of these two people. My grandparents. They had so many children, laboured for a half-century on the farm, and were not always kind to my mother but were so gentle with me and my sisters. It was weird to reconcile that these were the same people. Maybe that’s what compelled me to continue my covert traipsing operations year after year.

The smell of my grandpa’s Aqua Velva cologne perfumed the small bathroom. Everything was different than ours at home, in terms of the design (carpeted toilet cover and matching toilet ‘skirt, dull avocado vanity) and what it contained. Opening the mirrored medicine chest was a cherished activity, which I did every trip and always alone. I’m not even sure if I went to the bathroom, but I was fascinated by the neatly organized pill bottles, creepy but alluring plates of false teeth, the packets of denture rinse, and the men’s razor with its hairy brush, small round container of suds, and cup with “Old Spice” sailor script. 

But it was the tube of Close-Up cinnamon toothpaste that really held my attention. I had never seen this kind of toothpaste before, we always had the garden variety Crest or fancy triple-level Aqua-Fresh that dominated the market in the mid-80s. I’d squish a blob of the red liquid on my finger. It tasted sweet and I wondered if it could even clean your teeth.

Before leaving the house I would lean against the white deep freezers that sat next to the back door and listen to the voices of men, aunties, and kids yelling to one another. I’d also ponder the picture on top of one side of the kitchen cabinets, directly above the table. It featured a peasant about to break a humble loaf of bread. He seemed so sad and poor, in his black garb with a bowl of soup by his side, and a Bible.

This image is from a photograph taken in 1918 by Eric Enstrom of Bovey, Minnesota. Enstrom said, “I wanted to take a picture that would show people that even though they had to do without many things because of the war they still had much to be thankful for.” His daughter, Rhoda Nyberg, transferred the image to canvas and oil paints and called it “Grace.” The man featured is Charles Wilden, a peddler who sold foot-scrapers in Bovey. It’s one of the most reproduced images of the 20^th century.

The Candied Voyage

The Chinese restaurant is another memory that looms large. With a couple of dollar bills in our pockets, me and my cousins would gleefully speed our way across a few backyards and turn left when we got to the main street. The shop was on Royal Street, which was one of seven main drags that cut across the tiny town of about 350 people. The others had equally regal names, like the town itself, which was called Imperial. The remaining streets were: Duchess, Princess, Queen, King, Prince, Duke. Royal Street came between Queen and King, thus dividing the town by gender, title, and rank. Fascinating.

The restaurant doubled as a candy and convenience store, and it was always very quiet, clean, and a little dark. There were a few tables set up and a booth or two for indoor dining, which included both Chinese and Canadian cuisine. Covered with rounded boomerangs, overlapping rectangles, and pointy stars inspired by the 1950s space race, the laminate countertops gleamed in the late prairie afternoon sun that made its way through the three large windows facing the street.

It was always this time of day when we came to the restaurant. We didn’t arrive for our family visits until late morning and then it was all about lunch and playing or snooping through the house, in my case. Plus, who buys candy in the morning? We’d always leave after dinner, which would be too late to get sweets and we always had a bountiful spread of those to choose from anyway. My grandpa was a sugar hound. 

Sometimes I’d spy little kids through the glass displays or see them seated on little chairs behind the counter. I wondered about who they were. Do they live in the suite on the second floor? What do their bedrooms look like? Do they get teased at school? I don’t remember ever hearing them talk, which made them even more curious to me. I was just a traveler, a visiting child who’d enter the store once or twice a year to stock up on penny candy and sometimes French fries. What were their impressions of us? 

These cherished visits transported me from the regular world of family get togethers into a calm and sort of mysterious place that I enjoyed. Being in the restaurant was like make-believe because everything about it, the vibe, the look, the people, was so different than my shopping experiences at home. It seemed like something from another time, which is how the whole town felt to me. It was a dusty place where old people who used to be farmers lived and where my mom couldn’t wait to escape from on her hurried passage into adulthood. I loved getting candy and being in the restaurant for many reasons, including the fact that it centered around sweets, which I love fiercely to this day.  

Today starts with the customary 5 am wake-up call from Elliott, which I pretend to ignore in a futile attempt to stretch out the inevitable. I like when she and Jhona gather with me in the dark, stepping on my body like bedroom adventurers claiming their territory. We communicate in chirps, meows, and love.

Once I’m up the chores begin: open living room drapes and switch lamp on, turn on empty fish tank, switch on kitchen lamp, survey the cat dishes and determine which ones are dirty, wash dirty bowls and place soft food inside. Open cupboard where dry food is stored and place a small amount in the other bowls.

Fill their water and clean out the litter box, carefully sweeping the irritating litter bits from wherever they’ve been scattered. Turn on lamp in laundry room and then take vitamins. Take kettle from stove and add water to it before placing it back on the stove. Turn on HI and decide which coffee to have.

Place the grinds in the mini French press, along with some cinnamon, turmeric, and black pepper. Clean the cat dishes, then put water and desired essential oils in the diffuser; wait for the water to boil. Catch the kettle before it whistles and pour the steaming liquid into the press.

I then prepare my cream-laden coffee to take outside with Elliott, who is howling at the back door. As I put her harness and my garden shoes on, I peer sleepily through the porch windows. It looks damp and cold; such is way of early spring. Out we go, both happy in our routines of exploration and restoration.

Mindful of my 8am meeting, our outing is shorter than usual. She doesn’t protest too much, and I wipe her feet with an old tea towel before letting her back inside. Jhona is waiting for us on the Victorian chaise lounge chair in the laundry room and is a little skittish as we enter the house.

I lean against the counter while they hungrily slurp up the thick circles of cream next to their dishes. We all love cream here. After wiping up the floor I take my coffee upstairs and begin freshening up before the meeting. I put on a headscarf and some pearl earrings. No bra, only trackpants – this is life now.

The harried admin assistant got the invitations wrong and I’m not needed after all, which was a relief. Yet I somehow feel put out and begin an imaginary conversation with said assistant about all the things I did to be ready for 8am, for naught. We all do this, right?

The pattern of replaying my tiny sacrifices -aka delusional blaming- is usually easy to reign in, but not today. I must repeatedly pull myself back in my own lane as I wander around the house feeling aimless. There are so many things I could do, but I’m not feeling compelled one way or another.

I am under the bloom. The perfumed weight of nature’s beauty and uncertainty press into my head. What do I do during this lockdown? What can I do? Elliott’s orange tail swishes just out of Jhona’s reach and he stretches his long black body towards her. While watching them the world slows, just what I need.

I feel myself straining against the despair and deep frustration with the state of things in this, our thirteenth month of Covid-19. People don’t need sad, they need happy, or is it both? It’s all relative and not even by lockdown but by the second and between the hours.

Like yesterday when I was in a bad mood after an online yoga class. I love and desperately need yoga to free my clogged mind and keep my body tight. Why did I feel like that? Maybe I was releasing my deep tissue fears about Covid or catching the scared energy of my fellow species. All of the above probably.

I want to pick my pace and keep it slow down this next stretch of the pandemic marathon. It’s such a grueling race because the guidelines keep changing and we’re forced to create our own version of health with many hands tied behind many backs.

It’s still so surreal, isn’t it?

Lighting candles, turning on salt lamps, pulling tarot and oracle cards, eating chocolate, doing my stretches, spending time in the backyard, and absorbing the furry wisdom of my cats. These are things I can do as we continue burrowing through this viral-spiral-mess.