. . . how it’s going.
You’ve seen the side-by-each comparisons, I expect. On social media it’s usually one of two juxtapositions:
Fair enough, even funny enough, sometimes. But also tiring enough, in quantity. “Snipe, snipe” is a crummy basis for a society.
So that I don’t do the exact thing that’s making me tired, I herewith launch a new blog category: how-it-started (how-it’s-going). But this one is not for hypocrisy or policy failures. Instead, it will celebrate progress and achievement. To start us off, here’s a friend’s garden from last week. Stay tuned for the promised follow-on shot, later this summer.
How it started . . .
It will also celebrate sheer continuity. After all, it’s good to know that some things last: Not everything disappears or fades away. To start us off, here’s me with the same reaction to sunlight, about 72 years apart. Nope, some things don’t change, although the wrinkles and the hat are both new.
How it started . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . how it’s going.
It’s an old riddle, unencumbered by a funny answer.
Why did the chicken cross the road?
To get to the other side.
It’s an anti-joke, even in its (too many) other formulations.
Why did the chicken run across the road?
To get to the other side faster.
It don’t mean a barkle
if it ain’t got that sparkle.
[Doo-wop, doo-wop, doo-wop, doo-wop, doo]
– Early draft of a song later made famous by
Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong
Sparkle. Catch light. Whatever you call it, its presence adds a lot to a close-up of a stationary bird. It might just be a reflection of sunlight off a wet cornea, but it can imbue a photo with life. Without it, the subject could be a stuffed bird–a dead parrot, perhaps. With it, suddenly there’s somebody home.
I’m going to get it tattooed on the back of my hand.
You can use a letter again.
I’m going to put it on an endless-loop crawler on my laptop screen.
You can use a letter again.
I’m going to cross-stitch it and hang it on the wall straight ahead of me when I look up from the screen/keyboard.
You can use a letter again.
Several months ago I gave in to the no-longer-current craze for online word games: Wordle (in the New York Times) and Canuckle (the Canadian version). For those who haven’t played, the goal is to guess a five-letter word in just six tries. Using simple colour-coding, the game tracks which letters are right but in the wrong position, which letters are right and in the right position, and which letters you’ve already guessed wrongly, to keep you from using them again by mistake. With that much feedback and assistance, how hard can it be?
Not very hard, sometimes; impossible, others.
This week’s little bonus? Tips for all the iced-coffee lovers out there.
Now, these come with a caveat: I do not drink coffee–not any kind of coffee–so I’m relying (like, completely) on this article. Its title sounds super authoritative, though, so we’re going to go with it: The Best Way to Make Iced Coffee (It Isn’t Cold Brew).
Nope, not I, even though Ottawa’s nighttime skies have been overcast for the last two night times, completely obscuring the aurora display from an unusually strong solar storm. (I mean, come on: We had rain last night. Rain!) Considering the knowledge and the specialist equipment often needed to even see, much less fully appreciate, astronomical events, the auroras by contrast are an equal-opportunity event.
“For most people here on planet Earth, they won’t have to do anything,” said Rob Steenburgh, a scientist with NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center.
Yup, you basically just need to stay up, show up, and look up. And the sky needs to stay out of the way.
“That’s really the gift from space weather: the aurora,” Steenburgh said. He and his colleagues said the best views may come from phone cameras, which are better at capturing light than the naked eye.
Snap a picture of the sky, and “there might be actually a nice little treat there for you,” said Mike Bettwy, operations chief for the prediction center.
My phone camera is better at picking up light than my eye even just when photographing sunsets, so I guess this doesn’t surprise me, but it’s good to be reminded. Go ahead: Take your best shot, literally.
All I can see is the yellow that carpets the median for, well, as far as I can see. From this place in space I can’t see the scrubby, spready, jaggedy leaves that I know are certainly there. Likewise, from this moment in time, I can’t see the seed heads that I know are certainly coming; seed heads that can be lovely, briefly, and one by one . . .
. . . but that are ugly in abundance.
And an abundance of dandelions is what we have, pretty much everywhere, thanks in part to a 15-year-old provincial ban on using dandelion spray for “cosmetic purposes” in Ontario. This ban has had limited effect in our house–my cosmetics routine rarely included dandelion spray–but the effect in our neighbourhood has been marked. Every year the medians and boulevards and sports fields and grassy verges beside walking paths and front lawns all get a little bit yellower. This shouldn’t come as a surprise.
Winter’s frost? Who cares?
The challenge is to survive
spring’s depredations.
As a squirrel wobbles in the breeze atop a mere twiglet at the tip-top of my magnolia tree, I don’t even lunge for the klaxon or the slingshot by the back door. It is what it is: Maybe some blossoms will survive; maybe not. I’m done fighting rodentia irresistiblia–irresistible in the sense of a force that cannot be stopped, not in the sense of a temptation too attractive to resist–although I’m not quite done complaining about them.
Still, the universe graciously rewards even baby steps toward acceptance. A mere half hour south of town, in a protected courtyard where sun-warmed brick walls create a welcoming micro-climate, I come upon two magnolia trees in full unbothered-by-squirrels bloom.
They are, maybe, a bit past their prime (as am I, perhaps), but are lovely nonetheless (as, oh, never mind). Although it can’t be literally true that it’s always spring somewhere, some days it feels like that.
Posted: 2025 Apr 19
Thanks to John Whitman for this slightly dismayed face from downtown Ottawa.
This space is available for other submissions.
