some Thanksgiving, Sainte-Adèle, etc.

Another weekend, another Thanksgiving [see also; two years ago], at mother-in-law's cottage, Sainte-Adèle, up in them Laurentides (roughly an hour's drive north of Montreal, if that situates you a bit better). Christine, myself, our two young ladies and irritable cat, Lemonade, hosted by my most favourite mother-in-law. I think this is only our third weekend up here this whole year [see also: labour day weekend], unable most weekends due to the array of child appointments: ukulele lessons, choir practices, ringette, German language school, etcetera. What have we done to ourselves?

We saw no deer on this trip, but there was wind. And squirrels, running up and down the side and the back of the building. As ever, I attempt these get-aways as marathon reading sessions, most of the weekend focusing instead on poking through the larger manuscript of my ongoing "the green notebook," recently subtitled "a writing vigil" [see a variety of excerpts of the project at my substack], as well as putting the final touches upon my essay on Christine's new book, Toxemia (Book*hug Press, 2024), thanks in no small part to an assist by Kim Fahner [see the final essay here] (I think at least half the time up there was dedicated to that particular essay). I might have poked at the beginnings of a short story, also. I'm not sure yet. Otherwise, Rose and I did get part of an evening of chess (her eldest sister and I played a great deal when she was roundabout Rose's age, also): we're already rather evenly-matched, so we keep landing into positions where we've almost no pieces left, simply chasing each other around the board into uselessness, but we enjoy it enormously.

Still, there's a whole mound of material I'm attempting to get through. Did you see the new Stephen Cain poetry title? The new Leonard Cohen biography? The new Ashley-Elizabeth Best poetry title? The stacks of brilliant items produced through Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative? I mean, holy crap: previously uncollected or unpublished works by Bobbie Louise Hawkins (what I was most excited about, honestly), Adrienne Rich, Diane Di Prima, Muriel Rukeyser (some very cool things in there), Edward Dorn, etcetera. Have you seen the collection Other Influences: An Untold History of Feminist Avant-Garde Poetry that Marcella Durand and Jennifer Firestone edited? I've been recommending it to everyone. I spent the weekend working up many notes on many things. A flurry of notes, and then the final morning as I woke completely wiped out, unable to do much of anything (Christine did the driving en route home, due to my brain-fog), confirming Covid-positive once we landed back in Ottawa (today is day five: second day the kids out from school), which is very irritating. So the past few days have been fallow: those notes, as of yet, are still only notes.

And the young ladies have been requesting I minimize photos of them in this space, but here's the youngest during a walk we took down the road, on our final evening there. The tower in the background. The slight pink-purple of sunset and encroaching dusk.