My kind of reality

Calm, beautiful, fresh and clean -- my garden on Friday afternoon was the exact opposite of the book manuscript I had just been proofreading. The golden leaves in the background are witch hazel; in front, the few remaining sweet peas are still putting out some scent.  

Scene of many a raucous bird fight over who gets to bathe, who gets to sip, the birdbath was quiet Friday afternoon. Heavy rain the night before left detritus in the water from the tree above.

Winter pansies. I like blue and white, so filled several containers this fall with  colour to see me through the winter.

I'm proofreading a book about how every business in the world must digitalize to survive -- a complicated and frightening affair -- so it was a relief this afternoon to step outside into the back garden. A heavy rainstorm last night had washed everything clean, and the sun was shining on the golden witch hazel and my last remnants of sweetpeas. The pale fuchsias were glowing, and the blue winter pansies will soon need a dose of fertilizer. Sometimes the garden is a raucous place, with the blue jays screeching, the squirrels running through the treetops and the robins fighting over the birdbaths, but today, all was calm. Even  Mr. Darcy was having a nice late-afternoon snooze in his well-padded cat basket on the back porch. It was a world away from the frenzy to turn everything we touch, hear, smell and see into the virtual reality that I had just been reading about. Businesses may have no choice but to go digital to survive, but we humans need other things.

The fuchsias got moved this spring, so didn't do much all summer. Now they seem quite happy and are putting on a show. 

You're right, the birdbath is tilted and the white Japanese anemones are leaning way over in the other direction, so everything looks off-kilter. This area of the back yard is to be reworked (and the birdbath straightened) after I get my book proofed, my essays written and my school books read. 

More pansies and violas in this planter in the front garden. Winter pansies are amazing -- a bit of snow stops them growing for awhile, but once they thaw out, they just keep going. 

The Korean dogwood in the front garden has red berries at this time of year. The birds seem to eat them, so they can be the site of a lot of activity sometimes. 

A closer look at the Korean dogwood berries -- they have little knobs on them that are quite interesting.

And, the little birdbath in the back. It was always tilted too, until my brother Brian generously spent some hours levelling it when he was here this summer. I'm loving having at least one level birdbath!

Mr. Darcy in his well-padded cat basket -- yes, there is a basket under the well-used fleecies. From a distance, the basket sometimes looks like it has ears when all you can see is the cat's head poking up.. 

These are two Portuguese laurels we planted last year. Our tree guy promises they grow like stink, and will soon be blocking out the big houses that have been built behind us. They put on a couple of feet this summer, so it looks like he's right. Once they're higher, we'll have the lower branches trimmed so we can  get into the garage again. 

This spring's primroses survived the summer, and are now trying to bloom again. They look a bit ragged, but with fertilizer, they may make another showing this winter.

And, a last look at the sweetpeas and witch hazel. Such a nice change from the computer. 

They go up, they come down

All summer, Dunbar residents have been keeping a beady eye on the progress of construction of their new Stong's grocery store, which is to open on the bottom floor of this condo development. The new store will be 20,000 square feet compared to the 14,000-square-foot old store.

There's a very deep hole at the site of the old Stong's store just down the street. Out of it, another condo development will rise. 

This is what used to be on top of that very deep hole. The store closed in the spring. 

Almost in inverse proportion, the hole at the site of the old Stong's store gets deeper as the building that will house the new one grows up a few blocks away. Both will be condo developments -- what else gets built in Vancouver? -- but Stong's will occupy the bottom floor of the building now going up at 26th and Dunbar.

That's three blocks away from the old location, and closer to where I live -- just a block and a half up the hill from me. Ever since the old store closed in the spring, I've been picking up groceries here, there and everywhere, usually tying my shopping into my walks. That's getting old, winter's coming on, and it's time for a pleasanter routine. Stong's initially promised its new store would be open by Christmas. I'm holding them to it.

Another view of the condo development that will house the new Stong's. It's to be called The Ivy. I really hope somebody will take the name seriously and grow some ivy on the building.

For the birds

The empty doorknob hole is presumably the entrance to this birdhouse someone built in my neighbourhood. I don't know if the fake bird would attract or repel customers.

It was a birdhouse made with door hardware that got me taking pictures of birdhouses this summer. Someone in a beautifully maintained Dunbar property had gone to some trouble to build a birdhouse with an entrance hole consisting of the empty space where a doorknob once poked out. The slot for the key was still there, and the figure of a bird sat on a perch beneath, presumably hoping for company.

I don't know if this structure, which was prettily located in greenery at the entrance to the property, was functional or pure decoration, but after I saw it, I started noticing birdhouses here, there and everywhere, even in dense and busy Vancouver. Here are some of my finds:

A trio of birdhouses sits atop a pole in a traffic circle on Blenheim Street in Vancouver. The city forced the builders to get rid of most of the greenery at the bottom in favour of directional traffic signs.

A closer look at the Blenheim birdhouses. Located on a steep part of the street, they can look quite striking against the backdrop of ocean and mountains as you head north down the hill.

Another birdhouse in my area that does double duty by holding address numbers. This one looks like it's been used.

Nothing fancy here, but the birds probably don't mind. These birdhouses are just across the fence at our Saltspring property. They were built by our neighbour, who believes in accommodating the wildlife.

John built two birdhouses for our Saltspring house, and birds have made good use of both. This one sits on top of an unused chimney at the top of our house. 

The other birdhouse -- echoing the colour scheme of the bigger house -- sits above the kitchen door. Its twittering inhabitants intrigue Mr. Darcy, and the parent birds are always flitting over our heads as they come to feed their young.

If you want to go fancy -- and expensive -- birdhouses like this are for sale at the Saltspring Saturday market. 

Birdhouses are hard to photograph because they're often so far away, but I tried to capture this one in a back yard in Kitsilano. It's the same colour as the blue deck of the house. 

I can't guarantee this is a birdhouse -- it might be for bats -- but it was too scenically located to pass up. It's on a trail along the Fraser River, in the Southlands area of Vancouver.

Pants, not tights

Ever since skinny pants arrived on the scene, I knew I should be joining the rest of the female population and squeezing into them. On Tuesday I tried and failed. This new pair of mildly narrow pants is as skinny as I'll ever get. 

The Globe's Leah McLaren broke the horrible news first: skinny jeans had arrived. She tried some on and was so upset that she took them off quite quickly. Then came a 2015 sketch on the CBC's The Irrelevant Show called "Tights are Not Pants," in which one woman grills another about wearing tights as, well, pants. Call them leggings, jeggings or yoga pants, but if you buy them in the sock department, have to sit down on a bed and scrunch them up to get them over your feet and adjust the crotch seam at the top -- guess what? They're tights, not pants. In which case, you should wear a long sweater to cover your butt. The sketch ends with a man saying: "Who cares if they're tights or pants?" and adding he's 1.2 billion times happier to walk behind a woman wearing tights instead of pants as pants. Three or four other male voices chime in to agree.

Which leads to my friend Ros and I sitting at a restaurant window Tuesday and watching the women walk by. Every single one was wearing something tight and dark on her legs -- ultra-skinny jeans, leggings, tights, yoga pants. "It's like a uniform," said Ros. "Everybody is wearing the same thing."

Now Ros, like me, dresses casually and comfortably. We like pants that aren't too tight, sweaters and shirts that are long and loose, and hike-worthy jackets. Our primary footwear is running shoes. But it turns out that years of watching skinny jeans and tights on all the women around us have had their effect.

"I've been thinking," said Ros, "that maybe I should catch up." Uncannily, only a week earlier, I had been impelled strongly enough by the same feeling to end up in a store fingering a pair of something black, rubberized and vaguely repellent. But there is comfort in numbers, so Ros and I headed downtown to The Bay. In a dressing room, remembering the CBC sketch, I scrunched up a piece of dark fabric and convinced it unwillingly over an ankle. The higher it got, the more it felt like squeezing into a rubber tube, unforgiving and circulation-stopping. I thought of the corsets women once had to wear, and the damage it did to their bodies.

But there was something that looked more like pants in what I suspect is the store's old ladies' department. They went on without scrunching, and had a slightly more contemporary look than the semi-flares I've been wearing. I bought them -- it was seniors' day, after all.

On the way out, I passed a store display of pants. Most were as skinny as the ones I couldn't get into, but there, in all their glory, was a pair of flares. Perhaps I jumped the gun. Another few years and my collection of old bell-bottoms may be just the thing.

This display outside a store on Main Street looks to me like tights masquerading as pants. No wonder guys love this fashion!

Discovering Balzac

I am delighted that French author Honore de Balzac is one of the authors in my Simon Fraser University course this fall.  He was only 51 when he died in 1850, but -- apparently fuelled by lots and lots of coffee-- he produced more than 100 novels and novellas in his lifetime. Our professor is pleased that our class enjoyed the book; she says a class of younger undergrads found the descriptions interminable. I didn't even notice them.  

I caught a whiff of the Vancouver of today in Honore de Balzac's Old Man Goriot, a portrayal of Paris in the early 1800s. Vancouver has its extremes of rich and poor, with the drug-ridden misery of the Downtown Eastside just blocks from multimillion-dollar oceanview condos offering every luxury imaginable. Post-revolution Paris had Madame Vauquer's wretched boarding house for the city's failures, as well as glittering ballrooms and palaces for rich aristocrats who were thriving again after escaping the guillotine.

"Money is life. If you have cash, you can do anything," says Monsieur Goriot, a once-wealthy merchant whose two daughters leave him to poverty and death after he gives them all his money for dowries so they can join Paris's high society.

Goriot's fate is one strand of the novel; the other is the efforts of handsome young law student Eugene Rastignac to climb into high society through his wits and looks -- using one of Goriot's daughters for the purpose. Rastignac's impoverished but noble rural family gives him 1,200 francs a year to live on; he needs 25,000 to join the aristocrats in their games.

Ambition, greed, crime, duels, love affairs -- what's not to enjoy about this book, the first Balzac I've ever read? Detailed and textured, it's as relevant in today's consumer-oriented society with its extremes of wealth and poverty as the day it was written. Even better is the fact that it's one of about 100 books written by Balzac, reusing many characters, as part of a grand scheme to portray every aspect of his tumultuous society. He called it The Human Comedy. I call it a guarantee I will never run out of reading material.

Here are a couple of excerpts, relating to Madame Vauquer's boarding house and its tenants:

"Our language has no name for the odour given off by this first room, which ought to be called 'essence of boarding house.' It smells of all that is stale, mildewy, rancid; it chills you, makes your nose run, clings to your clothes; it repeats like last night's dinner; it reeks of the scullery, the pantry, the poorhouse."

[The lodgers had] "cold, hard faces, as worn as ecu coins withdrawn from circulation. Their thin lips concealed greedy teeth. Each lodger's appearance hinted at a tragedy, either fully played-out, or in progress...."

Fall scenes

Our fall colours can't begin to compete with the glories of Eastern Canada's, so I don't expect anyone back there to be impressed by my autumn photographs. But when I head out for my late-afternoon walks these days, I like what I see. The low angle of the sun at this time of year, plus the changing colours and late fall flowers and foliage, make for some beautiful effects. Here are some scenes I've come across lately:

I regret that I  can't identify this tree as anything but a street tree, but the fall light on it one day made it glow like a candle.

Further down the street from the first tree was another, glowing at the end of the block.

At the foot of  some street trees in the Kerrisdale area were beds of these odd-looking plants. Their burgundy coloured leaves with spikes sticking up made them quite spectacular. 

Here's what they looked like from further back. Surrounded by a green hedge-like material, they made for an odd but weirdly beautiful show. 

Orange berries falling over a wood fence have a very autumnal effect.

There were two huge mounds of these daisy-like asters in this garden, but the camera angle wouldn't allow for both. You'll have to take my word for it. 

A beautiful green hedge, a show of yellow fall flowers, and a scooter. Very Italian. I took this for John, who was inspired to go out and look for a scooter for himself quite soon after. 

There's nothing fall-like about this, but I am constantly amazed by the weird shapes people carve their trees into. What is this? A planet with a surrounding galaxy?

A fragrant rose in late-evening light, with palm fronds behind, delighted my friend Georgeann who was walking with me. 

I never heard of fall crocuses until I moved to the West Coast. They're very popular, but I can't see the attraction. Because of my prairie background, I think crocuses should be small, furry and a wonderful surprise that means spring has arrived. 

Most of the trees are still green, but the coloured ones add some pizzazz to the streets these days. I took this Sunday evening. 

A little further along, plum-coloured leaves glow in the light. And yes, the orange barrier in the foreground signals that the city's demolition frenzy continues.

Family visit

My sister Diane and her husband John were in Vancouver recently, visiting from Winlaw in the Kootenays, where they moved this summer. Both looked fit and relaxed -- I think country life will suit them well. Diane and I did what we usually do when we get together -- went for a walk to a favourite spot on the sea shore, admiring gardens and trees all the way. Here are some photos from their visit.

Diane and I enjoy this spot on the beach, which is about a 20-minute walk down the hill from my house. Once a seal arrived to check us out, popping up about 10 feet from where we sat.

They're too small to see in this photo, but there were plenty of ducks and seagulls in the water, and a blue heron was waiting for fish. In the distance, the city skyline.

We always have to stop and check out my favourite garden at Third and Collingwood. It's often made an appearance on this blog before, but every season offers different colours.

Diane with some of the fall blooms in the garden.

These hydrangeas are a beautiful burgundy red, a nice contrast to the silver grey of the weeping pear.

Elsewhere on our walk, we came across a lone sunflower all tangled up in the leaves of a tree, which were just turning red.

Diane's husband John with their two bikes. Sadly, his was stolen from the back of their RV shortly after this photo was taken.

Diane and John loading up to head for home.

Until next time!