Both sides now

Joni Mitchell looked at clouds, love and life from both sides for her famous song that mused about illusions versus reality. There aren’t many illusions these Covid days as we trudge our familiar daily-walk routes. But sometimes, taking a few steps in a new direction, or simply turning our heads a different way, shows us a new side of things. Here are a couple of illusions/reality scenarios that John photographed on recent excursions.

This fine rhododendron bush spreads its lush glory at the edge of  a lawn at the University of  B.C. (All photos by John Denniston.)

John took a trail behind that same bush and was amazed at the different view inside. On one side, greenery and blossoms; on the other, the stark geometrical branches that support it all.

To me, this is the very definition of "greenway." High grass narrowing a winding path, trees arching overhead. But this is not part of Vancouver's vaunted "Arbutus Greenway," even though it runs on a boulevard beside it. 

On the other side of that pastoral path is the city's version of a "Greenway" - a belt of straight pavement unshaded by anything green at all, at least on this stretch at 42nd and Arbutus. Illusions, reality, side by side.

Town and country

As English author George Eliot knew, something magic happens when the beauty of the country is combined with aspects of town life. I think we have a little of that in our village of Vesuvius on Saltspring Island. The plant-draped Vesuvius store is a tiny piece of town in the country. All photos by John Denniston. 

While we wanted a "country" experience, one of the best parts of our life on Saltspring has been the people we found there. Here's our favourite neighbour, the artist Kathy Robertson, painting my front-yard garden.  A city girl, she settled happily into the natural beauty of Saltspring. Sadly, she died in 2014.

Our living room window provides a view of both nature and neighbours. Interspersed among the trees are the rooftops and chimneys of the houses around us. 

‘Twas town, yet country too; you felt the warmth

Of clustering houses in the wintry time;

Supped with a friend, and went by lantern home.

Yet from your chamber window you could hear

The tiny bleat of new-yeaned lambs, or see

The children bend behind the hedgerow banks

To pluck the primroses.

-From Felix Holt, by George Eliot

Once, during our long-ago search for an island cottage, John and I pulled into the driveway of an isolated bungalow surrounded by trees. It was raining, and through the windshield drizzle I could see an older man peering bleakly through a window at us. I don’t know what he was really thinking, but to me, his face expressed everything I feared about country living – isolation, boredom and loneliness, leading to one desperate plea: “How can I escape from this?”

We did not buy the bungalow.

Instead, we bought in a village. Even though we were looking for “country” – as opposed to our city life – when it came right down to it, we chose “clustering houses” over nature-drenched isolation. 

Eliot’s little passage, written in the 1860s and looking back to an earlier, more pastoral England, made me think about the eternal push and pull between city and country – nature and society – a common theme not just in literature, but in many of our lives.

 Eliot herself was notoriously torn. She grew ill and stressed in the city, and always improved when she got out of London. But her work connections and family were in the city, so that’s where she spent most of her time. No wonder she imagined an idyllic world combining the best of both.

As an Alberta farm kid, I know all about the country – its loneliness, its limitations, but also the pluses of wild roses on an unpaved road, and a dome of glittering stars reflected in midnight snows. But I’ve spent my adulthood in the city, where work, friends and convenience have outweighed the negatives of crowding, expense, and the sad destructiveness of never-ending growth.

For me as for most of us, it’s a balancing act. We live in the city for work, family and convenience, and scrounge what “country” we can –whether it’s a local park or a get-away cottage.

Nothing could be as idyllic as Eliot’s fancied village, but John and I found a close-enough version. Our cottage on Saltspring Island rings with birdsong, but it also looks out over the rooftops and smoking chimneys of our neighbours. Unlikely as it sounds, we have actually experienced Eliot’s scenario of “supping” with friends in our tiny village and walking home, albeit by flashlight rather than lantern.

The island has its downsides, with limited water, services, shopping and grueling ferry connections. But when it comes time to sell our little piece of country – hopefully not for a few years yet – there will be no repeat of that long-ago bungalow scene. No potential buyers will be scanning my face and wondering just how desperate I am to escape.

 

Every summer afternoon, neighbours gather at Vesuvius Beach just down the hill from our house. We can't feel too isolated when there's a regular group to gossip and swim with.

Leave the crowd on the beach and walk to the nearby ferry terminal, where you are immediately immersed in the beauty of nature. 

This isn't in the village, but a short drive away, you can imagine you're in the English countryside with a flock of sheep on a hill.

From almost every point of our yard, we have beautiful views of nature. Here, a rainbow adds colour to a view of Mount Erskine.

When winter comes, nature is just as beautiful. Here's a look down the hill at the property next to ours. 

And that little Vesuvius store looks cozily inviting in a winter snowfall. Eliot understood how tiny bits of town life enliven and enhance the country. 

Spring mysteries

City streets are full of mysteries in spring, when people and plants come out of hibernation. Walk far enough on any spring day, and you’re likely to see something curious. Here are some of the things I’ve noticed in recent weeks that made me ask, “What? Why?”

All winter, the bathtub lady -- now apparently a permanent street installation -- wore a classy pair of white figure skates. This spring she morphed into a mermaid with a puffy checked blue tail...

...an unusual chest decoration and a fish she's either talking to or planning to eat. Once you accept the oddity of this street display with its seasonal changes, the mystery is, why a mermaid? Why the fish?

On this rather ratty boulevard, spotted with only a few uncared-for plants, were these signs in one direction...

...and this in the other. The mystery is, what plants were stolen? There are no holes or soil disturbances indicating any were ever there.  The signs are homemade, but took some effort and have a feel of semi-permanence. What is going on here?

A view of the boulevard the signs were on. Walk a little farther, and the adjoining boulevard is full of new plants, just dug in. 

Here's the adjacent property. Do the sign-waving neighbours (see the sign in  the distance down the street) think some of this abundant display was uprooted from their yard? So many questions, but no one to ask.

When these trees with luscious purple blooms began showing up all over the city a few years ago, it took me awhile to figure out what they were. They turned out to be Empress, Princess or Foxglove trees -- pick the name you like. They are also apparently tremendously fast growers, tolerant of terrible conditions, and a menace to the ecosystem because they spread like, well, foxgloves.

But aren't they pretty? The mystery is why anything so gorgeous is also a weed.

This is a wisteria, just down the street from the Princess tree. I took the photo because the blossoms were the same colour, but grew down instead of up. Another mystery of nature.

We're back to the signs, but different ones in a different spot. What is it with these home-made signs and people stealing from each other's yards? Also, the "personality" issue is a bit mysterious, but perhaps it's a translation thing.

The second sign in that same yard, also warning about the impact of stealing. Nobody has ever stolen any of my plants (maybe they aren't worth it), so I'm mystified by this outbreak of warning signs. 

Red rhodos, purple clematis, and dead tree trunks -- why is this one of the prettiest things I saw on my whole walk that day? 

It's probably the contrast between the rough dead bark and the fertile lushness of the new spring growth. Death and life -- the mystery of the seasons. 

Dome at last!

Finally, John achieves a loaf of bread with a dome instead of a dip.  It only took a dozen tries and a small stack of new kitchen equipment. 

Here's some of that equipment: A new loaf pan, an oven thermometer, a food thermometer, and a new set of scales to weigh ingredients.

The last time we visited the ongoing saga of John’s bread-making efforts, he was still looking for the solution to his sinking loaves.

At that point, he’d already bought fancy new scales to weigh ingredients instead of depending on guesstimate measuring cups; discovered whole wheat bread flour instead of regular whole wheat, and was using a thermometer instead of guessing at what “tepid” means. Since then, he’s discovered that lard works better than olive oil for greasing pans (a particular low point was the loaf so stuck that it tore apart, making it not just a sunk loaf, but a disemboweled one.) And – maybe this was the problem? -- he bought a new thermometer that showed our oven’s 400 degrees is actually 375.

But until last week, all these tweaks, purchases and discoveries seemed to make no difference. No matter what he did, his bread kept sinking as it baked instead of rising into the pleasant dome shape that his recipe promised.

Finally, out of the internet world of bread-baking chatter came a new angle he hadn’t considered yet.  Could it be that the 9 x 5-inch pan he’d been using was too big?  The online suggestion was that for the amount of flour in his recipe, the pan should be only 8.5 x 4.5.

The discovery was so exciting that he immediately set off to the Gourmet Warehouse for shiny new pans, my old ones of that size being a little tarnished.

And voila! Victory! That half-inch in length and width made all the difference. John’s next loaf of bread had a dome at last.

That should be the end of the story. But. It seems that a smaller pan scooches the dough into a denser mass, so the heat takes longer to penetrate. In other words, that first, perfectly domed loaf was, actually, a little doughy.

But as John has found, there’s always a solution, usually involving tools. From now on, he’ll be stabbing his loaves with a thermometer to ensure they’ve reached their proper internal temperature of 190 degrees. And once he solves that problem, I’m curious about where his bread-baking adventure will take him next.

Earlier baking disaster: When the loaf won't leave the pan, it's not pretty.

The loaf that sank and tore. No wonder John was happy when he found a solution ....  

....in the form of this spanking new 8.5 x 4.5 loaf pan. It only needed to be the right size.

Here is John's hard-won  recipe:

100% Whole Wheat Bread

 

Lightly grease a (8.5x4.5 in.) loaf pan or line it with parchment paper. Set aside while you make the dough.

Put 3 1/4  cups (425 gr) of whole wheat BREAD flour into a bowl – let it warm to room temperature.

Add 1 tsp of salt, 7 grams of yeast, to the flour and mix.

Add 1 tsp of sugar to 425 grams of tepid (105F) water and pour it into a well of the dry ingredients.

Mix together and beat vigorously with your hand (or with a wooden spoon if you prefer) for no more than 2 minutes or until the dough comes away from the side of the bowl; it will be very soft and sticky.

Pour the dough into the prepared pan, cover with a damp dish towel and leave in a warm place for about 30 minutes or until the dough has risen almost to the top of the pan.

Bake at 400 degrees for 30–40 minutes or until well risen and brown. It should feel light and sound hollow when turned out of the pan and tapped on the base.

Transfer the whole-wheat bread loaf to a wire rack and, if necessary, return it to the oven for 5 minutes to crisp the sides and base. Leave on the wire rack to cool.

Quick whole-wheat bread can be kept for up to 5 days.

 

Snip, snip, snip

 Don't cut your own hair is a basic rule I've been violating ever since Covid made hair salons seem dangerous. Here's how it's going so far. Photo by John Denniston.

When I couldn't reach the back of my head to cut it myself, I called for help. My friend Linda did a pretty good job.  Photo by John Denniston.

“Fie, for shame!” said aunt Glegg in her loudest, severest tone of reproof. “Little gells as cut their own hair should be whipped and fed on bread and water, not come and sit down with their aunts and uncles.” (Chapter 7, The Mill on the Floss, by George Eliot)

When Maggie Tulliver, fed up with nasty comments about her unruly, tangled hair, goes upstairs and simply cuts it off, she doesn’t understand the immensity of her deed. The shock runs through the entire family gathering – her mother is shamed, her aunts condemnatory, her uncle jokes that she should be sent to jail, and her brother says she looks like the village idiot.

Until a few months ago, the idea of imitating little Maggie was unthinkable. There’s a rule somewhere – as Eliot understood – that you do not take scissors to your own hair. I’ve always followed it, even when annoying bits and pieces cried out for self-lopping between regular haircuts.

 But there was the hair salon up the street with its dangerous Covid vibes, and here was my hair, relentlessly growing. It looked like a long time until the twain would meet.

And so, I began with a few tentative snip-snips to get the hair out of my eyes. Such a relief. Then, inspired by a friend who’d done the same, I tackled the hair over my ears, the “wings” that push out sideways like the Flying Nun’s ridiculous headgear. The result was a little ragged and unbalanced, but the wings were gone.

As the Covid numbers flourished and the hair salon looked farther away than ever, I began feeling something I hadn't experienced since a childhood effort (not successful) to grow my hair long. When I turned my head quickly, I could feel a swath of hair following behind, a kind of unsettling rearguard action. I now had a mullet hairdo – business in the front, party in the back, as the saying goes.

Which led, one day, to my hanging my head over the back of a park bench, and my friend Linda, masked and armed with my little nail scissors, cutting the hair at the back of my head. If this was fiction, it would have been a disaster. In Maggie's case, for example, Eliot describes how tantalizing it is to go overboard with scissors: "I speak to those who know the satisfaction of making a pair of shears meet through a duly resisting mass of hair. One delicious grinding snip, and then another and another. . . ."

But Linda has a sense of restraint, as well as a natural eye for this kind of thing, so it was fine. By the time she was done, the back of my head had some shape again. The mullet was gone.

In Eliot's  novel, Maggie was forgiven for her hair-cutting, especially by her father, who always took her part. But the local hairdresser, Mr. Rappit, was severe, “holding up one jagged lock after another and saying, ‘See here! Tut-tut-tut!’ in a tone of mingled disgust and pity, which to Maggie’s imagination was equivalent to the strongest expression of public opinion.”

I don’t know what my own long-time hairdresser will say when I finally see him again. But the hair-cutting taboo has been broken, and from now on, I’ll be much more willing to snip away at stray annoyances as they arise. Hair, Covid has taught me, is not as sacrosanct as I’ve always thought. And, as Maggie found, even mistakes will eventually be forgiven.

The scissors: Tempting and taboo.