urban garden jungle / montreal

My garden looks like a thriving paradise of plants.


It's actually a battle armed with hairy creepers, stinging tentacles, sneaky rhizomes.



Every year I think I’ve given the plants enough space and every year they fight for more.

What do I see here? There will be tomatoes. Or... there might be. Because there are also racoons, squirrels and groundhogs--who also like tomatoes.

There are no crash-car movie scenes. It’s not intergalactic warfare.



But believe me, there’s fierce conniving, choking and strangulation snaking in the shadows.

Here especially.



The beans grasping for territory, the tomato determined to hold its own.

And I'm not even mentioning the squirrels, groundhogs, racoons, skunks, earwigs with their pincers, gooseberry maggots inside the black currants, the slugs and other bibittes. 

In short, I'm loving another summer of gardening in my plot at the Jardin Communautaire la Pointe-Verte.

inner-city bees, eggs, gardens

I could have zoomed on the beehive but the graffiti belongs to the environs. Note that 'zoom' in this instance is a photo editing term. Before that, you 'zoomed' with the camera lens. Before cameras, 'zoom' was a sound word, the noise of something moving fast. Once upon a time, it was a sewing term. However did it become a social media app?

I won't say exactly where the hive is situated because the bees like their privacy.

Me, too, I kept my distance. But of course, it's in the Pointe.

R is trying to engage this cool inner-city chicken in chat, but she's not interested. His hair is pandemic long but no match for a red rooster comb. 

The chickens belong to an egg-laying initiative at the Batiment-7 in the Pointe. Also to educate kids--and maybe even some adults--as to where food comes from.

This is one happy, well-fed chicken.

The many people who belong to Montreal's community gardens were not allowed access to their plots until... mid-May, I think. They are now open with sanitary protocols.

I've been able to harvest rhubarb once, tomatoes are in flower, leaf lettuce, arugula, carrots, onions coming along, pole beans trying to climb farther, garlic scapes cut.

The basil seedlings survived marauding insects and one heatwave. So far at least.

The chamomile is posing against the black currants that I'm looking forward to. Black currants aren't readily available in Montreal, even at the market--and expensive when they are. I love black currant jam.

This wealth of growth is set in urban Montreal.


The last picture is called Find the Chicken.

ps Chicken pics were taken about a month ago. (R's hair is longer now.) We stopped to see the birds today but there are only two hens left. One hen and a rooster gone. Apparently two foxes had visited. The open area where the chickens used to roam has now been enclosed with chicken wire. So... there are inner-city foxes too.

Things that jump over the fence in the night

I don't need a pandemic to stay home and notice the minutiae of daily life because I already spend a good deal of time at home by myself scribbling words.

One small observation is how the people who live across the alley on the second floor have lights strung year-round over their balcony. The lights aren't kept on all night, but they're shining when I get up at 6:30 on a winter morning. Snow, no leaves on the branches, cold brick, looped strings of lit bulbs. It's cheerful, yeah, on a dark winter morning, the sun not up yet.

I have only ever once, a few years ago, seen anyone on the balcony. A girl of about eight years old playing by herself. At the time I wondered if she had a bedroom window that faced the balcony and the parent or parents strung lights so she wouldn't… I don't know… be afraid of the balcony at night. Or maybe so she would see lit smiles through her curtains.

The girl would be a young teen by now. I've never seen her again. Maybe she was only a visitor, sent outside to play while the adults gossiped.

And anyhow, a person doesn't need a kid to do things that might seem childish or needlessly reassuring and cheerful, says me who does not have a child, yet keeps a heart-shaped stone, a magic spool of gold thread, and other tchotchkes on her desk.

The lights aren't as visible through the leaves. I'm not as likely to notice them in the summer, but they're still there.

Yesterday R said that one of the lightbulbs was on the ground by his bike in our yard. That would entail a trip from the balcony, along the ground or through the trees--leaps across branches--over the neighbour's fence, then across the alley and over our fence. Under the fence is possible, too, at strategic points.

An adventurous squirrel or raccoon? To what end? The tiny, inner-city backyard that we think of as ours becomes another place at night

Last week we were gifted a large blue flip-flop.

random October thoughts

Yesterday evening we had one of those whipping rainstorms that tore the autumn leaves from the trees, so this morning I looked at the leaves still left on the branches a bit longer.

Then I decided to wash the sheets and hang them out to dry, so I could take this picture to help me remember how yellow the trees are in October when I'm sleeping on these yellow sheets in the winter.

And today -- a first --  I measured my tea with a tea caddy spoon. It was a gift and it's the perfect size for exactly how much tea I want.

I used to measure tea with a teaspoon. One teaspoon plus a tip of teaspoon more. This morning was a before and after moment. Before was teaspoon. After is tea caddy spoon. You think I'm kidding? In a world with so much misery and stupidity, who cares about a spoon? No one. You're right.

But I take my sanity where I can get it. The colour of the sheets and the leaves. The shape of an etched pewter bowl and a graceful handle.

I have yet to write about a trip to the sea and a chimney that was dismantled in September.

what's wrong with this map?

I bought this postcard when I was downtown today. It's a map of the city of Montreal, right? But something is wrong with it.

Sure, all the hot spots are there.

The Plateau. The mountain with its cross atop and where you can go skiing in the winter. The Oratory where you can do the stairs on your knees if you're feeling pious and want everyone going by on the Queen Mary bus to know. Espresso in Little Italy. Bagels in Mile-End. Downtown. The Gay village. And over on the Decarie the famous Orange Julep.

 
Cardinal directions in case you need orientation, including a patriotic fleur-de-lys in the event you need that kind of orientation as well. The highways showing you how to get off the island.

On the other side of island, the river. Not just any ol' river but the St. Lawrence River that Jacques Cartier thought would lead to China. Up top you have the remains of Expo '67. Below that the site of the Grand Prix. The Champlain Bridge which is being rebuilt as I write.  An arrow to head you toward New York.

Butbutbutbutbutbutbut??????

Why is the neighbourhood where I live not marked on this map?

There is it, right there. It's called Pointe St-Charles. Believe me, it exists.

new book / great start

Despite the general sluggishness of summer, when all you want is to drink something cool and laze about, Five Roses has been getting off to a good start.

Lookee-look! at this wonderful review in the Montreal Review of Books. 
http://mtlreviewofbooks.ca/v4/reviews/five-roses/

They hosted a well-attended launch party for the anniversary of their 50th issue at the Drawn & Quarterly bookstore on July 8th. Myself, Xue Yiwei, and Sylvain Neuvel read.

I wish I'd had the presence of mind to take a picture of the inside of the bookstore--brick walls lined with books--but I was too excited. However, before the reading I took a picture of the front window where Five Roses gets chummy with Rudie Nudie.

An excerpt from Five Roses has been published in the US in the handsomely produced magazine, Apogee. There's a special pleasure to seeing your words on good paper, the pages illustrated with fine artwork.

Also last week, I was invited to the Pointe division of the Legion Hall where I was entertained with a wealth of stories about the Pointe from a couple of decades ago--bank robberies, the flatbed truck heaped with Christmas gifts from the West End gang (that was), a three-shift restaurant to feed the rail yard workers. All "for my next book."

As a footnote to the review above, here is how you set a table for breakfast.

And though I never made a cake this pretty when I was a child (to this day, decorating is not my forte), I have this picture permanently filed in the same compartment of my memory as Popeye and Felix the Cat. 

my new book!

Five Roses T-shirt, FARINE FIVE ROSES sign, my new novel, Five Roses!

arugula pizza / Pointe St-Charles

Before the rain started today, I hustled over to the garden to get arugula to make pizza for supper.

On the way I saw a U-Haul backing up to an apartment building. Cheap construction, poorly maintained. When I used to work evenings and walked home from the subway at night, I took a longer route to avoid walking past that building. I'd seen baggies and money change hands in the doorway. Been accosted by strung-out tenants. One, on the third floor, liked to drop his bag of garbage out the window to the sidewalk. Now and then, a startled woman in a sari would be herding a child inside.

She's since moved away. I haven't seen any drug deals for a few years. The building is altogether quieter as the neighbourhood changes. Since last summer two older fellows have started sitting on the doorstep on sunny days. They smoke--cigarettes--and drink cans of pop. From their angle, low to the ground, they eye the legs that pass, but that's as threatening as it gets.
Today, a woman in her 40s--excitable, hair frizzed blond--was moving in. She had a gang of friends helping. The U-Haul was backing up at an odd angle--not to the door but a first-floor window. It had been slid open as wide as it could, which wasn't very a wide. She shouted for the driver to stop backing up so I could pass on the sidewalk.
On my way home, half an hour later, the move was finished. I could hear her in her new apartment talking loudly to her friends, deciding where things should go.

Here's the pizza. Homemade tomato sauce, sauteed arugula and leek, blobs of fresh mozzarella.

Five Roses memorabilia

In 2012 or 2013, when I was writing my novel, Five Roses, I bought a FARINE FIVE ROSES T-shirt in a shop on St-Laurent. It's not there anymore--the shop, I mean. St-Laurent still is, though it undergoes periodical and sometimes radical face lifts.
If I recall correctly, the shop sold better-than-average Montreal memorabilia. No snow globes, no flags, but other cool stuff like these T-shirts printed with a drawing of the red letters on the scaffolding high above the southwest horizon of Montreal. I got a grey T-shirt because it was the only choice in a size that fit me.

This green T-shirt belonged to a friend's daughter. She left in a give-away pile of belongings now that she's left Montreal to explore farther-off horizons. The T-shirt is worn and soft, but still gives off vibes of fiery hair, roller derby energy, brazen legginess. I like wearing it, though I'm short, my hair is going white, and I'm comfortable at my desk.

book covers

I have a new novel, Five Roses, coming out with Dundurn Press in July, 2016. Yeah, I'm excited.

Among the many steps between having a manuscript accepted and seeing it published is choosing a book cover. Since I already have a suspiciously flowery title, I wanted to stay away from images that were delicate.
Montrealers will probably guess that the title has to do with the Farine Five Roses on the south-west horizon of Montreal.

I had expected to be able to use the sign for my book cover, but was not granted permission by the company who now own the building. I argued that the sign is an iconic landmark belonging to the skyline of Montreal since 1948. I've seen T-shirts, cushions, cellphone covers, even mirrors emblazoned with the sign, but the company was adamant. 

Fine. I took my camera through the neighbourhood of Pointe St-Charles and along the Lachine Canal where the novel is set. 

Here are some of the pictures I sent my press, Dundurn.

Brick row houses are the norm in Pointe St-Charles, though I suppose one would have to be an aficionado of brick (which I am) to truly appreciate this image. 

Here's an abandoned factory complex--Canada Malting--by the Lachine Canal. Since an abandoned factory plays a significant role in Five Roses, this could have made a good cover. 

Or this close-up? 

Pictures I took in the Pointe were characteristic of the setting of much that happens in the novel, but they were too visually busy to use as a background for a title. This, one for example.

Weaving would have been a good image since one of the characters in Five Roses has a loom she sets up in an old warehouse on the Lachine Canal. Weaving also lends the ambience of many threads being gathered together and woven into a piece of cloth, which is part of what I feel I'm doing when writing a novel. 

But as a book cover, the image is perhaps too staid? 

An important aspect in the novel is the gentrification of old neighbourhoods--people like Fara in the novel, (and myself and R) who move into rundown neighbourhoods, buy an old house and fix it up. On the one hand, this is called revitalization. On the other hand, the lower-income residents get  pushed out. I'll write more about this in a later blog. 

Between my press and myself we chose to use a photo which R took in 2001 when we moved to the Pointe.

Here's what the same door and window look like in 2016: 

That's gentrification. Perhaps including the wine bottles on the window ledge? Though who knows what was on the other side of the plywood. 

hapless but eager gardener

I have no green thumb. If I thought I had a green toe, I would gladly stick my foot in the soil. My beans get blight. My cucumbers wilt. My tomatoes flower and that's about it. Eggplant will grow for me, but even when I shelter it inside chicken wire some beastie still manages to get inside and shred it to bits.

And yet I feel good about digging and sifting earth to make it soft enough for beets. I curl tendrils of snow pea vines around the teepee poles I've built to support them. I plant blue cornflowers to attract bees. I pick arugula to stuff into my sandwich at lunch. All winter I have pesto I've made from the basil I've grown.
Sometimes another gardener is stooped over the earth or watering plants. Birds chatter in the wooded area next to our plots. Every so often a train goes by on the embankment--actually so often that I associate the sound of shunting and wheel grinding with working in my garden.

Just now, my plot doesn't look like much--an 8' x 11' rectangle of earth among other rectangles of earth. Some people have small bushes of herbs, winter onions ready to be picked, pansies already blooming. Here's my rhubarb which wintered very well, thank you.

My soil should be good this year since last year we emptied our backyard composter in the garden. Yup, that was R trundling wheelbarrows of rich, shit-stinky compost through the Pointe. After a season of snow, the compost no longer smells, though I'll have to pick out the corncobs and avocado pits that haven't decomposed yet. Or leave them.

This week I hope to seed beets, lettuce, snow peas, radishes.

looking for colour / March blues

If April is a cruel month, forcing lilacs from the dead land, March is dead land.

The city snow melts, exposing eddies of thawed garbage, soggy cardboard, litter that won't break down in a thousand years, decomposing turds. knotted baggies of dog poop. Why do people collect the poop and leave the bags of poop on the side walk?

If only I could get into my garden allotment where I'm sure crimson rhubarb spears are thrusting up through the earth--belying the dead land--but the gate is still padlocked.

Yesterday I went looking for colour which, admittedly, was plastic and paint and oxidized copper, but even that cheered me in these last dreary days of March.

A fence in sunlight. 

An old Xmas wreath. 

The usual Montreal road havoc which  guarantees a daily dose of orange to beat Hallowe'en.

No lack of graffiti

Copper turns milky blue green as it oxidizes. 

And she brought her own colour with her jacket and hat, and matching lipstick, fingernails, earbuds, cell phone. 

january, 2016

Winter finally came to Montreal. I'm looking out my back door in the Pointe, an older neighbourhood of brick row houses and narrow backyards. Those are our garden chairs. That's clematis along the fence. It's still morning here. I didn't venture farther out.

I missed seeing snow. People complain about the shorter days and lack of sunlight during these winter months, but I find snow helps--reflecting what light we do get back at us, making the day luminescent. Hm,.. I'll try to remember that when I'm cursing while trudging along the not-yet-cleaned side walks.

Five Roses / Dundurn Press 2016

In 2016 I will be publishing a new novel, Five Roses, with Dundurn Press in Toronto.

The novel is not about flowers, though one of the characters is called Rose.

The title has to do with the FARINE FIVE ROSES sign which is a landmark on the south-west horizon of Montreal. From 1954 to 1977 the sign included the word FLOUR which was removed in 1977 in accordance with Quebec language laws.

I'm not writing about flour mills either, though the fact that industry once thrived in south-west Montreal is a significant factor. I am a little fascinated with abandoned industrial complexes.

Here's the sign as seen from Pointe St-Charles where the novel is set. It's an inner-city neighbourhood being gentrified as I write. The neighbour a few doors down just had her brick redone. From another direction I can hear floors being sanded. Another neighbour is gutting the ground floor of his duplex. My novel takes place in the early 2000s when the process of gentrification in The Pointe was gearing up. For better or worse.

The setting of abandonment and appropriation reflects the loss and recovery the characters in the novel experience. A sister kills herself, a baby is lost, a mother dies. I'm giving nothing away here. These events have already happened. I want to know how the characters move on after a suicide, a lost baby, a death. There's no such thing as ghosts and yet. A house stands empty for a year. Two boys eat from a can of ravioli. One woman shows another how to fashion a rose out of marzipan. A loom is rescued. A baby howls with hunger. A chickadee pecks bagel crumbs from a young woman's hand. A man spies through gaps in a wooden fence. Rooms in an old house get a fresh coat of paint. There's cycling by the St. Lawrence River, a game of strip poker in a basement, a man practising fishing in the grass, a large orange cat. A woman climbs a rope ladder up the tower of a derelict factory.

I've tried not to overdo the number of times that characters notice the FARINE FIVE ROSES sign in the sky, but I've been interested in the sign since before I moved to the Pointe. I have a FIVE ROSES T-shirt. If I had a cellphone, I would get a FIVE ROSES cellphone cover. Are there FIVE ROSES lighters? FIVE ROSES jeans? Does someone have an old FIVE ROSES burlap flour sack?

That's a photocopy of an illustration in a 1940s cookbook my mother-in-law had. When I first saw it, I knew I wanted a copy. It was long enough ago that I had a hard time finding a place that made colour photocopies. At the time I didn't know what I meant to write about it, but I knew I would.

Not so long ago a friend sent me this in the mail.

It's the back of a Five Roses cookbook that she found at a farmer's market in Victoria, BC. The cookbook dates from 1962.

There are recipes for Whipped Cream Topping for Pies. (Silly me, I never knew I needed a recipe for that.)
Croquettes with this enticing description: "Five Roses Croquettes, with their crisp brown deliciousness, are a delightful food."
Witches Bonnets. This is a dessert and that's how it's written. No apostrophe.
Supper Snack--to be made with "White Sauce No. 2".