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Ice Meditations
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Ice Study: Guild Beach Scarborough
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Lake Ontario: Winter Muse
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Christmas Tree Stories
My grandmother Mary Raine gave me this Christmas tree when she was 93 years old. She no longer felt like putting it up every year, especially after the deaths of my father Ron and his younger brother Bob, so she passed the tradition to me in 2004, the year my uncle died. At the end of a Christmas haunted by absence, I carefully wrapped the treasured tree in my suitcase for the rigours of its plane journey from Missouri to Ontario.
I hadn’t decorated a Christmas tree since I was a teenager, but Grandma Raine’s gift inspired me to start again. My mother also gave me some decorations that had been in the family since the 1960’s, including cookie dough ornaments I remember from my childhood.
Artifacts like the dignified Wise Man connect me to home, family, and Christmas traditions, for when I rest him against the tree in 2020, I return in memory to a much earlier era. Once upon a time, my father, mother, and brother used to decorate a full-sized tree together while Birthday the cat lay in wait to attack the glass balls on the lower branches. Christmas carols bathed the tree-trimming task in familiar melodies such as the “pa rum pum pum pum” of Dad’s favourite, The Little Drummer Boy.
I’m fond of the cracks in these circular faces that once inhabited the tree of my childhood home. The cracks testify to the survival of countless Christmas seasons, each with its own tales of cat-paw attacks, breakages, and transfers to new storage locales.
The small red wagon has a story, too. Mom bought it for me one December in the 1970’s when we visited Kansas City’s Wornall House Museum to see it decked out in nineteenth-century Christmas décor.
To blend new memories with the old, I supplemented the original ornaments from Kansas City with ones I bought from Ten Thousand Villages, a shop that specializes in handcrafted items ethically traded from India, Bangladesh, Nepal, and many other countries.
Angels, elephants, lions, and moons mingle on the branches with a reindeer, a yak, and a yeti. Together, they honor Toronto’s multiculturalism and integrate the Christian traditions of my childhood with the religious and cultural pluralism that energize today.
In addition to a tree rooted in the present and the past, festive details like colourful textiles that Grandma Raine crafted — place mats and Christmas tree skirts — brighten the living room.
Also, two books that I received as presents in the 1970’s surface with the arrival of Christmastide. The first one is Christmas Stories Round the World, kindly given by my cousin Denise.
The second book, The Night Before Christmas, evokes happy memories of my parents reading the poem on Christmas Eve, just as their parents read it to them as children. The rhymes and folksy illustrations contained in Grandma Raine’s 1974 gift are enjoyed to this day.
Finally, giant postcards that my mother purchased in the 1960’s serve as Christmassy accessories for staircase spindles. I love how they jazz up the stairs and suffuse the atmosphere with psychedelic cheer.
All in all, sharing stories of Grandma Raine’s tree and other yuletide trappings has heightened my gratitude for gifts that gather layers of meaning as time passes. Thank you, dear reader, for indulging this narrative sleigh-ride through topographies of memory and family history. May your celebrations be merry, healthy, and bright!
Unexplained on the wide sidewalk, the door stands upright with the aid of two wooden stands that grip its bottom rail a few scrapes above the absent threshold.
Though the door no longer opens or shuts, the stout pin of one hinge remains, partly encircled by a barrel of the same rusty vintage. Cracked layers of thick white paint on the panels accent the unhinged condition.
Without a hinge to hitch portal to solid frame, access to an interior is lost. For a hinge is the servant to movement. It facilitates welcomes and good-byes. It swings the dancers, defines transitions, provides an exit.
This displaced door reveals the crucial role of hinges, for entrance to beloved places relies on a connecting part so humble that its anatomy is rarely learned: leaf, knuckle, pin, sleeve. Visitors take the obedient swivel of doors for granted, assuming they can handle endless openings, hesitations, closings, and slams.
No longer a barrier between public street and private property, the door’s new context gives passersby the chance to pause and notice its value as an object divorced from human passage. Free from the press of admission and the drama of expulsion, it serves in a different way now.
With its superfluous locks and bolts on display, the unhinged door invites visions of access without traditional keys. For how might humanity evolve if restrictive concepts of ownership become unfastened from their jambs? How might we open ourselves without fear?
At nine o’clock in the morning, serrated leaves by the fence receive the signature of dark steel lines. Dominant chains have eclipsed the delicate veins, and the diamond shapes seem to define the screen of the leaf-surface, imposing rigid patterns on what needs to grow free.
But the fence’s shadow, looping and stamping itself at nine, will be gone by noon, leaving the victorious leaf unchained. After all, it never asked to be cast in a shadow play. Nor did the plant sign a lease with the barricade that straddles its roots. It only desires to rise from the soil in peace.
The tattoo of links is impermanent, for a seemingly solid fence in the morning becomes a shadow of itself as the day wanes. By psychological extension, shifting solar movements can suggest a hopeful metaphor: harmful habits that create barriers to happiness can dissolve like so many shadow-chains. For example, the bruising self-criticism that overshadows confidence and disturbs inner peace may not be the iron-grey shackle of truth we assume.
If distorted thoughts are building a cage one steel rod of fear at a time, consider the power of one question, “Are these thoughts true?” Then take a deep breath and call out chimeras from their hiding places — behind benches of judgment, beneath shaming silences, under tongues that tsk-tsk on the regular — and watch them melt into phantoms with the passage of the sun. Challenge the cruelty that crushes self-love and reject the quelling projections of others. Above all, hold fast to what illuminates, such as visions of leaves that turn fences to trellises, limitless shelters that dapple and shine.
Not long before Pat died, he sent a card thanking me for a Christmas gift. The medication that he was taking caused his hands to shake, and it touched me that he had written by hand despite the difficulty. When composing Cousin Pat’s Letter, it seemed right for the piece to include an example of his handwriting, symbol of both his uniqueness and his suffering.
Pat used to collect antique glass bottles, so for his collage I fashioned a bottle shape from some handmade paper to provide a stem for a flower. Fragments of the thank-you letter became the petals.
In addition to glass-collecting, Pat enjoyed writing haiku. From 2002 to 2003, he composed almost two hundred three-line poems about cars, artists, coins, baseball, rock bands, and the antics of animals he observed from his window.
Words and Phrases from Haikus by Patrick Jones
and Arranged by Catherine Raine, 2020
In the months after his death, I read all of the poems, and a number of words and phrases struck me as characteristic of Pat. Eventually, the gleaned words suggested themselves as a new poem, and I hope Pat would approve of how I arranged his lines to make this collaborative text. Like the memorial collage pictured above, Born in Missouri is devoted to remembering my cousin’s interests, creativity, and sense of humor. He died much too soon.
Aging milkweed pods
suggestive of arching spines
crack open their seams,
give Fall those mad fluffy seeds
that hope no longer constrains.
Categories
Seasonal Reverie
Hovering at the height of the telephone wires,
the man in a cherry bucket sheers a section of tall maple,
an aerial chef dispatching vertical stalks for the chipper.
The chunk of trunk falls to the sidewalk,
splintering the moment into a thousand perceived realities.
The sky-worker, one section down,
four more cuts to go before the break.
His co-worker below who feels the thud of dead wood
buzzing through his boots and grey hiking socks
all the way to his toes, soles, heels.
The startled squirrel that leaps with instinctive flair
from a truck to the trunk of an intact tree.
The papa two doors down from the amputated maple,
his baby fascinated by the moving shape
silhouetted against the morning sun
that makes the roaring beast chew the air.
A frail witness across the street
pausing in the task of sweeping her walk
to remember playing in the neighbour’s tree house
that once rested on today’s fallen branches fifty years ago.
And in the house newly bereft of a steady shelter
a solitary woman stands sentinel,
long flowy curtains to one side,
nothing to hold back the rush of memories.
Like the day her father nailed the last plank
against the trunk, the ladder’s base
low enough for her, the youngest, to reach.
The crinkle of waxed paper that preserved sandwiches
packed for the children living out entire summer days
way up high in the branches with their comics, jacks, and fairy tales.
They would descend when the fathers returned from the munitions plant
and the mothers called them to gather for dinner.
She turns away from the window,
wanting a reprieve from the present,
switches the kettle on, and cradles her favorite mug
against the inner curve of her shoulder.
The cabinet opens, shortbread biscuits inside.
The curtains fall back and summer subsides.
This serious night that knows only waiting
wearies the line of us bound for Fort Wayne.
It slumps the postures,
turns luggage to chairs,
and makes a bed of the floor,
where a man dressed in scrubs
has stretched against a wall,
head on a hard-ribbed suitcase.
When headlights flash the gate open,
we jolt alert, tense as night lynxes.
Our backs arch then straighten,
the smallest of muscles poised to hunt for a seat.
Within seconds of boarding,
we survey our chances,
debate odds of rejection,
and pounce on the first empty chair we see.
Claims staked and bags settled,
sixty-four strangers commit their souls
to sail the expanse of Midwestern lands,
the vast curved platter that once cupped an ancient sea
now gathering and holding us in uncertain intimacy.
Soon the last of the dark folds itself into our dreaming minds
as we slumber in our seats past town after town,
and the sweet cadence of a Spanish lullaby
cradles caffeinated hip-hop beats
that leak from pulsing headphones near the back.
Discrete snores rasp out here and there,
like the first popcorn kernels to punch the bag bigger.
And far ahead in the first row,
a small rectangle burns in the gloom,
action film inflaming an insomniac screen.
Drifting in and out of wakefulness,
we nod to the rows of towering lamps
that follow loose curving lines of the highway,
hypnotizing us as we hurtle past.
The lamps unfurl, curl, whip left, sway right,
making patterns like feathers being shuffled,
the tremble of tall grasses before the prairie storm,
bluestems tossed and sown by spinning wheels of chance.
Come seven o’clock, a deep veer shakes us awake,
signals an exit that breaks the spell of endless highway.
And soon the chiming incantations of waking phones
ring out like singing bowls that circle an Indiana dawn.
Categories
Sunrise Wade at Bluffer’s Beach
Dad, I’m giving your military sleeping bag to the Anglican Church of Canada. The last time you unrolled this large pocket for sleepy cadets and folded your tall frame into it, Eisenhower was president and your younger brother was still in high school.You were serving in the US Navy, whose officers were training you to become an air traffic controller. From Midway Island, you witnessed atomic testing in the Pacific, received a gooseberry pie in a package, and wrote long letters to your sweetheart.
After returning to civilian life, you kept this olive-green souvenir of your time at Midway’s Naval Air Facility, and following your death in 1995 the bedroll that once padded your barrack’s bunk remained unclaimed. It was stored away in perpetual coil in my Missouri childhood home.
Not long after the 20th century spiraled into the 21st, the sleeping bag was unearthed from the mudroom and given to me. Following its passage from Missouri to Ontario, it continued its dormant, unfurled existence. Out of active service for 61 years, it seemed unlikely to be recruited for a second mission, and if the pandemic had not struck, it might have lain in limbo for another decade or two.
But today your Navy sleeping gear is needed again, recommissioned by the Community Director of a downtown Toronto church. He has requested emergency donations of sleeping bags, water, and shampoo for people who have pitched their tents against the sheltering bricks of the Church of the Holy Trinity.
So, I plucked your bedroll from its dusty cupboard and ran it through the washer and dryer. Then I carefully spun it around itself — a ritual winding before resurrection into relevance — and bundled it into a shopping bag for transport.
On the designated donation day, I arrived fifteen minutes before the doors of Trinity opened. To pass the time, I paced the nearby labyrinth with a loaded dolly that trailed behind like an unsteady pilgrim who carted your sleeping sack, a case of bottled water, hand sanitizer, and a blanket.
Guided by the twists and turns of an ancient pattern, I meditated on the evolving, looping journey of the sleeping bag — from Midway Island to landlocked Midwest, United States to Canada, Cold War to global pandemic, Navy to non-military encampment, father to daughter, car trunk to dolly, labyrinth to arched door.
In the gentle maze of my mind’s center, images related to the transfer of Dad’s military property appear: my father is in the sleeping bag, 21 years old and having just seen the ocean for the first time, and now it is 2020 and a new person is snuggling into the bedding, someone who needs it.
Dad, I see your spirit in the sleeping-bag gift. I remember how you volunteered as a job counselor for a local shelter and as a cancer-hotline listener. I still see you in acts of service and care, the unrolling of a temporary bed, its careful placement in a tent, a shelter during a time of pain. If you could send a message to your brother or sister in sleep, I believe it might go like this:
Take this donation with my blessing and heartfelt prayers for your well-being. May it provide a protective layer between you and the hard ground below as well as the cold air above.
Like you, I have known struggle. I fought a cold war, lived with epilepsy, and battled for my very life, surviving two bouts of cancer before the third one got me. I was vulnerable. I was scared. I often felt alone. But suffering passes. You keep smiling. You keep making jokes.
May this old but sturdy bedroll of mine help you sleep through the night, giving you strength to face the morning. May it contain some of my optimism, fight, and love to match yours. May it not let you down.
Sleep well, dear comrade, and may sanctuary enfold you always.
Be warm. Be well. Be safe.
Be at peace.
Putting bath-bomb enjoyment on hold for six months does not rate highly as an example of noteworthy sacrifice during a pandemic. However, from March to August of this year, it made me sad every time I saw the lovely non-violent bombs (a Christmas present from my sister-in-law) languishing in the bathroom cabinet.
Without access to a spacious lounging bath at home, I usually count on hotel rooms with tubs to provide ideal conditions for foamy immersion in swirls of moisturizing colour. During this unreliable year of ordinary expectations dashed, travel restrictions grounded my bath bombs on the shelf, turning them into symbols of the luxurious freedoms that I had previously indulged in without a thought.
On July 31st, Ontario entered Stage 3 of re-opening from lockdown, and I celebrated by planning a trip within the province, vowing, “I must not take this privilege for granted ever again!” The chosen destination was Bancroft, and I booked a motel for five days near the end of August.
When the day of the road trip arrived, I carefully packed the four bath bombs that had remained inactive for so long. Upon settling into the motel, excursions to Silent Lake Provincial Park, Papineau Lake, Egan Chutes, and downtown Bancroft took place in the days that followed, and evenings were devoted to long soaking sessions in playful combinations of fizzing blues, purples, yellows, and pinks.
On the last day of the holiday, bittersweet satisfaction accompanied the ceremonial dropping of the fourth unexploded bathing-device in the tub (indigo with gold stars) before fully packing up for departure. Never had I appreciated with such fervour the deferred pleasure of travel, motel life, and a return to decadent bathing.
Neither smooth nor automatic,
the mechanics of forgiveness
clank fist-first into the soil
broken by a rusty plow
that moves so slowly
it strains to finish the first row.
Forgiveness is not a miracle.
It is work to be done
and redone as the seasons cycle.
It requires the engagement of gears,
calls for the mallet, the shovel, the hoe
to shoogle resistant brick
and stony clods of dirt
that have hoarded energy locked
into coils of resentment.
Muscular labour turns the wheel,
pulls up the choking nettles,
and digs a clearing for rain,
for seedlings,
for tenderness to grow.
Say yes to this employment.
Grab the tools from the shed.
Go.
Categories
Silent Lake Provincial Park
Gathered by avid thermals,
the downy nipple rises from nested bed,
sails the length of groves,
and embroiders the soil in gossamer
when she lands.
Fresh gliders follow their sister in flight,
freighted with seeds that trust the wind
to lift and spill them free.
Ghost stars that surrender
to be flung into the future,
they drift in currents that flow beyond lifetimes,
feathered travellers who ignite wishes
hushed from candles to palms of gods.
Fluffy as eiderdown, these tufted legacies
weight their fall with massive purpose,
Zen pilots seeding blossoms for the pollination corps.
In the same way, when compassion
flies the nest of our minds
to meet the world’s loom,
connecting threads weave furrows
for kinship and love to sow their crops.
Just like the time a grieving daughter
received solace from a stranger,
a wedding guest who said,
“My older brother was your dad’s friend forty years ago,
and I used to tag along with their crowd of high school buddies.
They all mostly ignored me,
but your dad showed me how to dribble and shoot a basketball,
taking time to coach me. I never forgot that.”
No matter how fragile,
filaments spun from empathy
go home smiling to the unknown,
shimmering pilgrims with the power
to comfort a yet unborn daughter
whose father lives again in the story
of kindness that defies death
and returns to bless the living.
The daughter at the wedding
can no longer conceive a child,
but she has faith that gentle generations to come
will cultivate expansive families,
communities both chosen and given,
whose deep bonds testify,
“We are all of love-bearing age.“
The slick gray humps —
shadows of glorious glacial whales of old —
have ebbed from cycles of freeze and thaw and rain
to create islands of receding winter.
From January to March,
these masses have shrunk,
slunk much lower to the edges
of the sidewalk by the cinema.
Saturated with soot and exhaust,
the sullen ice-beasts resist the warmer air
and clutch at soggy remnants of broken
plastic spoons, cigarettes, and coffee cup lids.
The time to release caution
and rejoice in change
has not yet arrived,
for the evidence of a harsh season
still lies in gritty drifts on the ground.
Spring is not to be fully trusted
because she has not unlocked herself from this long winter.
Nevertheless, let us witness
how this reticent mistress has lifted
the curled edges of sidewalk ice
so that currents of rippling melt-water lift the floes,
stirring hopes we guard like hungry seeds.
