Post #75 – Back Home, Between Systems & Seasons

When I sat down early this afternoon to resume editing a piece I wrote a few years ago and put away, our doorbell rang. It was my friend John with a container of Danish blackcurrant compote, a treat I had always enjoyed for its strong and slightly tart flavour before we went away but something I haven’t been able to find in the stores since we returned. It was a truly thoughtful gift, since I had seen some in their kitchen and commented on not being able to find it. I put it on the counter and thought about what bread I would put it on later and whether or not I would include peanut butter (I had it on Calabrese with olive oil margarine this time, and it was a real treat).

John was doing errands, but he stopped long enough to talk a little, so we talked about the wind. It’s blowing a gale today, it blew yesterday, and it was blowing the day before. He said he hated easterlies. I do too, though I think of today’s as a northerly, maybe with a slight eastern tilt, but still northerly. John is a mariner, and I know the discomfort he feels with easterly winds, even though his slip and mooring are sheltered from almost every wind, because here easterlies are always either unsettling and unsettled winds or storm winds, and I understand including a northerly in that unhappy category. Today Environment Canada tells me that we have north winds at 28 kph, gusting to 74, and it’s those fierce and frequent gusts that have sent a parade of whitecaps across the grey harbour under cold grey skies.
He commented that the tides have been running high but that the barometer’s been pretty steady, and we decided that there must be a trough somewhere offshore, strong enough to lift the tides a little, and the wind is pouring into it. Tomorrow it is supposed to be clear with milder temperatures and the wind shifting to norwest, a much happier direction. I’ll look forward to that, because being stuck between systems and between seasons has begun to wear on me a little.

So we are between seasons here. There is no snow for skiing, no outdoor ice for skating, no signs of budding spring (except for reddish tinges on some anticipatory trees), and no opportunities to work outdoors because that relentless wind just makes you too crazy and too tired. But we are at least back home after our week in Ontario, and it’s good to be here even with the wind! We had a wonderful time with two branches of our family, in St. Catharine’s and Toronto respectively, and nothing can compare with the joy of hanging out with your kids and their partners and being able to share in their homes and their lives, but you can’t do that forever, and one of the pleasures of back home is the familiarity of things. There are the chores, like filling the humidifiers, hauling firewood from the shed, monitoring the stove, making tea, buying groceries, getting the mail – boring stuff perhaps, but our own stuff, and there is a pleasure in that.

And this is Post #75 of Field Days: A Miscellany, the blog I started on my birthday just over a year ago. This post, like the blog, is appropriately miscellaneous, even haphazard, today, just a few comments on a nasty wind, a pot of compote, low pressure systems, seasonal limbo, and the ordinary aspects of being back home. It, and the 74 posts that preceded it, have continued to give me pleasure in their making, so if you’re a reader who made it to here, this is the 75th one, and you can probably expect to see plenty more, if you’re interested, that is.