Tuesday, November 29, 2016

going for a walk Nov 28, 2016


There's a lot going on in the world and I keep my sanity as best as I can by going for walks. Sometimes I head west toward the river. Sometimes I hike uptown. Whichever direction I take, I leave my post-industrial hood of brick row houses and newly constructed condos. 


There's always something to look at.

Yesterday, as I was walking toward the Lachine Canal, I was disappointed to see this blank wall of a factory. For a few years the door had an elaborate graffiti around the frame that made it look like a theatre entrance: red velvet curtains furled back and held in place with silk tasseled cords. The door was painted a deep magical red. Why would anyone think a plain grey wall with a rectangular door was an improvement on that?


I kept walking and got a new shot of my favourite sign.


And the sunset and clouds and Lachine Canal did a gorgeous pseudo-velvet painting for me.


Saturday, November 19, 2016

montreal in transit







On the way home from a film, R and I took the Papineau bus across the street from the store where I bought a futon sofa a few years ago. At that time, the store was called Elvis Meubles. It's not called that anymore.

When I bought the futon, I thought I was finished with futon sofas. Futons were all I could afford when I was a student, but now I was a grown up. I wanted proper furniture.
But as we soon discovered, a futon was the only kind of sofa we could get up the narrow twist in our stairs, and I wanted a sofa in my study. Somewhere I could fling myself when writing got too much for my head. So I bought a futon on Papineau at Elvis Meubles.



On the bus R and I talked about the movie we'd seen. I was irritated by the many possibilities for character and plot development that had been left hanging.
Except for two people giggling a few seats away, nobody else on the bus was talking. They were texting. You gotta stay in touch, eh? What happens if you don't? You have to know what all your friends and family are doing. Keep up with the latest.



I was looking at the way people dressed. Today was sunny but still sock and jacket weather, but Montrealers can be schizophrenic when the seasons are changing. People are either eager to bring out the woollies before they're necessary or pretending it's still balmy when it isn't.





I wonder who is receiving all the text messages that are being sent. 
Do people have any sense of privacy or aloneness left?



Friday, November 4, 2016

aprons / Grimms' fairy tales / linen


Do you wear an apron? I'm pretty sure my mother wore one when I was growing up but I didn't take the habit with me when I left home.

I wore one the year I had a job baking cakes in a restaurant, because I didn't want melted chocolate or egg yolks dripped and smeared on my clothes. The kitchen wasn't so fancy that any of us wore full kitchen whites, except for the supper chef who gave himself airs. He had trained in France. The rest of us wore jeans and aprons. That was in 1981? 82?

At home I only started wearing an apron after I splashed a beloved sweater with hot olive oil. I opted for the bibbed apron over the skirt-style apron my mother used to wear.


That's not a picture of my mother and I haven't included a photo of my apron because it's long ago acquired a patina of avocado, tomato, orange juice, chocolate, oil and whatever else I've wiped across it over the years. An apron is handy when you need to blot your hands or clean a knife fast. I do wash the apron but the stains are there to stay. That's why they're called stains. (Stay = stains?)

I've been thinking about aprons because I want to know what kind of cloth would have been used to make an apron in Grimms' fairy tale times.


As far as I can discover, the common household fibre at that time in Europe was linen. Linen is made from flax. There are a few Grimms' fairy tales about the spinning of flax--most often when an irrational monarch demands that a girl spin flax into gold.


Last year I happened to wander into a shed in Austria where I saw honest-to-goodness flax. Even in the dim light, the fairy tales about spinning flax into gold suddenly made sense.


To get flax supple enough to spin into yarn, the stalks are threshed with flail, followed by retting, then scutching, AND THEN they are heckled with heckling combs!

If I'm ever heckled when I'm standing on stage, I hope I have the presence of mind to point out to my heckler that I am not a stalk of flax.

And here's a linguistic/textile tidbit I came across while looking up the history of cloth. When cotton was first introduced to Europe in the 1300s, people knew only that it came from a plant, and so they imagined there were trees that grew in India with tiny lambs on the ends of its branches. This myth lives on in the German word for cotton which is baumwolle. Literally: tree wool.

If you're wondering how far off the beaten path I went to find an old shed where flax used to be threshed, retted, scutched, and heckled, here's the view. The first snow had blown in the night before. Guess from which direction.


Making linen was a laborious process, but in countries that didn't have ties to cotton-growing colonies linen was still the least inexpensive textile until partway through the 19th century. Nightgowns were made from linen. Underwear was linen. Shirts were linen. Collars were linen. Skirts were linen.
When the brothers Grimm were researching and writing their fairy tales, aprons were made of linen. And people wore aprons. The word has been around in English since the early 1600s. Men wore aprons specific to their trade--carpenters, butchers, stonemasons, cobblers...


Even the witch in "Hansel and Gretel" wears an apron.



Illustrations of aprons courtesy of Fritz Fischer in Grimms Märchen (Bertelsmann Verlag, 1957)