We seem to have survived our first winter-- hooray. Spring starts tomorrow, heralded by a 'supermoon'. (We just popped out to look at this 'supermoon' and find it almost indistinguishable from the 'moon'.)
Last week a Toronto local told me, knowledgeably, that she she could feel spring in the air. I just felt cold, but it turns out she was right. It's spring. There is ground everywhere. The local playground sports sand, not snow, beneath the swingset. My children now run out to play soccer on the nearby field, wearing tee-shirts and shorts. My own soccer team held its weekly practice outdoors this morning. That was a bit extreme, and I wore about 4 layers of clothing, but we all survived and even perhaps thrived a bit better for the chilly sunshine.
This past week schools have been having March Break. My friend and I took our combined 6 children to a 'sugar bush', a woods on the outskirts of the city where maple syrup is made. We followed the path downhill (a hill! a hill!) through the trees, looking at the taps in the maples dripping into galvanized buckets, tasting harvested sap, watching 'Granny Maple' stir the liquid in giant iron cauldrons over open fires, using 40 buckets of sap to make a single bucket of delicious syrup, the old-fashioned way. We sampled sap and syrup, and decided that the effort of boiling is definitely worth it. Further along the trail we saw the 'modern' method of syrup-making: very primitive-looking blue plastic tubes strung from the taps in the trees to larger black tubes that wobble through the woods, conveying the sweet liquid to the 'sugar shack', where a single, enormous vat is heated in order to transform sap to syrup. Somehow I think there must be an even more modern, more efficient way to do this, but maybe not. Syrup is awfully expensive; perhaps this is why. Afterward we all had pancakes with yet more syrup at the cafe. Yum yum yum, especially with sausages, and hot apple cider.
Last week was also St. Patrick's Day, whose North American significance I'd forgotten. It was a day of frolic and greenery: green beer, sidewalk parties where everyone wore sparkly green clothing, and wandering leprechauns. The kids and I saw it all as we walked to the dentist, to piano lessons, and home. In the UK, where Irishness is freighted with deeper ethnic and social meanings, celebrating this quintessential (or do I mean 'essential'?) Irish holiday has heavy political import, and is done, if at all, quietly. Here it's just another event on the frat boys' calendar. When I was a child if you didn't wear something green to school on March 17, you would get pinched. In the dire event that you forgot (woe is me), you would tell your classmates that you were wearing green underpants, and pray they didn't check your claim. Some children even dyed their hair green. (Ricky Branson did that in sixth grade. Many years later I heard he died of a heroin overdose.)
Another reminder today of how very nice Canadians are. We made a family outing to St. Lawrence Market, a Toronto site of which we had heard much but not yet experienced. It's a big indoor hall with lots of food stalls (meat, fish, produce, cheese, chocolates, 'condiments'), expensive knitwear, shea butter in 28 varieties, and food samples at every turning. Great fun. After some shopping we treated ourselves to a late lunch, sharing a table with a lone young man who, prior to our invasion of his spot, had been reading on a Kindle-like object. We struck up conversation and he proved very friendly, sitting with us throughout our meal, recommending restaurants and discussing bookshops. At the end, as we all packed up to leave, he said, shyly, 'Here, I'd like you to have this,' and gave us a packet of small, smoked elk sausages from one of the stalls in the market. Now, that would not have happened in England, methinks.
No comments:
Post a Comment