FLOWERING UNDER THE FULL MOON

WITH TALK OF GRIEF AND SEEING CLEARLY, PLUS MORE ON EGGS AND GREENS

The full moon, our second one in the month of May, landed glowing, last Saturday-Sunday. And in the last few days the clematis has come into bloom on the ivy-covered back wall, star-shaped bursts of fuchsia in the green.

I’m always thrilled when these clematis unfurl

Today the first peonies arrived. The ants have been climbing over the buds for a week and now their work is done.

peonies of subtle white tinged with pink, on a bush that was in the bedraggled garden when I first bought the house in 1984… I moved the bush from one side of the garden to the other in 1988, but otherwise have done nothing with it except speak encouragingly to it from time to time

I saw the moon late Saturday night as I went to bed, a white orb impaled on the spike of the CN tower. It had a pearly white luminescence, perhaps because the air was super-clear, swept clean by cooling north winds.

my sheets dried quickly in the fresh dryness brought in by the north wind

In the bright sharp daylight, which has continued this week, the tall trees’ intense new green feels clearly etched, heightened, against brilliant blue skies.

That sense of extra definition, extra clarity, reminds me of the first time I got eyeglasses for my short-sightedness. I was ten years old and in grade six. I’d sometimes have to walk up toward the blackboard to read it more easily. It was a normal thing to me. I had no idea of how the world looked to other people. It was only when I was wearing my new glasses, as we were driving home from the opticians, that I saw with the extra clarity that 20-20 vision gives: the veining on the leaves in the trees amazed me.

The habit of not seeing well stayed with me somehow, despite my glasses. If I looked attentively at something I could see it clearly. But perhaps living with my mild short-sightedness for several years had dulled my visual expectations. I never developed an attentiveness to fine details. I tend to notice people’s feelings or their style or energy, rather than the specifics of their appearance. I still find it easier to recognise someone I see on the street by the way they walk or the way they carry themselves than by their facial features.

It makes me wonder about the many ways in which we tune in to other people, or fail to tune in.

seeing the larger scene in Grange Park; noticing the details of the fluffed out blossoms on the chestnut trees

I meant to post here at the full moon, but now it’s already Friday. My excuse for this delay is that I had wonderful distracting visitors for nearly a week, all people I love dearly. Tashi’s older brother Dom was here from Vancouver with his spouse F and their child, my four- year-old grand-daughter A. She’s terrific. I loved being out in the garden with her, finding flowers for her to pick and weeds to pull, and I loved watching her play on her own with blocks or small toys, keeping herself company. Sometimes she’d boss people around as she organised us into games whose rules only she had a grasp of…

The arrival in the house of this unselfconscious source of energy, confidence, and imagination was a full-moon tonic for everyone. There was laughter, and there were meltdowns, there was a whirlwind game of hide and seek, there were excursions to the playground in Grange Park…

Tashi with Amira in late 2022

And we felt ripples and waves of sorrow at Tashi’s absence, pain and deep regret that he was not with us to rejoice at A’s growing capacity for engaging with the world.

pale columbines, self-seeded, in the back garden this week

KITCHEN EXPLORATIONS - more on eggs with salad greens

I wrote briefly last week about the pleasure of a breakfast of fried eggs on leftover salad.

eggs over leftover salad

That combo gave me a taste for leafiness; now I want it every morning. Today, with no leftover salad to work with, I picked tender leaves from the small lettuce plants in the back garden, rinsed them well, shook out the water, then dropped them into a bowl. While my eggs fried gently in a cast-iron skillet, I added lightly buttered toast (from Dawnthebaker’s bread) torn into pieces to the lettuce, along with a sprinkle of salt, a drizzle of EVOO, and short splash of cider vinegar. As I tossed them all together I realised I’d just made a simple variant of bread salad. There is nothing new under the sun, truly.

here it is, the bread salad hidden by the eggs

I slid the fried eggs onto the salad and propped another piece of toast and a stick of Comte against the side of the bowl. The salad was barely dressed. The pieces of toast were there to absorb its juices and any yolk that ran once I’d broken into the eggs. Each bite gave me sweet egg, and the light tart edge of vinaigrette to balance it, all buffered by the toast. Perfection.

Notice that I’m back talking about tart-acid as an essential element.

I used half of the second piece of toast to wipe the bowl thoroughly and topped the other half with the slice of Comte. Those bites of tart intense salty cheese on toast were the perfect finish.

Welcome to my late-spring version of an ideal breakfast (“late-spring” because once it gets hot the lettuce leaves won’t be as tender and perfect; I’m imagining summer tomatoes in their place).

If you like a hit of sweet at breakfast you could skip the cheese and perhaps instead have a lick of jam on the last piece of toast.

two aspects of late spring in Toronto: a gorgeous spirea bush in bloom near the University of Toronto; a cyclist in Kensington Market taking a break by the painted wall of a building owned by the admirable Kensington Land Trust