On Boxing Day

By the fire

The fire in the grate is consuming the last of the firewood, and the year is dying down too. This evening we saw not only our daughter and her family in London (all of them confined indoors, afflicted by the Virus despite multiple vaccinations) but also my sister in Wales and even our son and grandson in Australia, about to start their breakfast. These rare whole-family encounters make me feel emotional. As I was ending the meeting, clicking on the red box to make the participants disappear, words from Rückert's poem Sei mir gegrüßt sprang to mind:

Ein Hauch der Liebe tilget Raum und Zeiten ...

which to the likely embarrassment of my friends and relations I posted on Facebook. One breath of love obliterates space and time, is what it means.

Family gathering by Zoom

It has felt like a long year, the first year we have spent in just one country for a very long time. Mustn't complain. Our not travelling is good for the environment, so I should think of it as off-setting. The only journeys we undertook in 2021 were our short flights to Mont Joli in August and Kingston in October, and our drive to Montreal in November. Those weren't new destinations for us, which feels like another shortfall. Still, I ought not to think like that. The cerebral explorations that have taken the place of terrestrial journeys often felt satisfying. My husband always claims that you can live adventurously without leaving home, and I've had a glimpse of what he means, this year.

We began studying an aria by Bach this week.

Christmas Eve above the lakes and hills

While the weather held, Chris wanted to spend the afternoon flying and I was in the mood to go with him, so up we went for three quarters of an hour. There's a distinctive look to the sky when freezing rain is on its way, with thin grey stratus cloud at about 4000 feet above the ground, great clarity below that and a black and white look to the landscape: fuzzy dark grey wooded hillsides, white lakes, with occasional hints of pale colour where the sky is reflected in the patches of water not yet frozen over.

Cracks in the ice that's now forming make crazy patterns like a small child's scribbles.

We flew north, keeping the Gatineau River upstream, on our right, to Wakefield and thence to Low where the dam is, before swinging round to the east and then returning south over the hilly and mostly uninhabited ground back to the Ottawa River at Gatineau. I revelled in the scenery today because we weren't distracted by any turbulence in the air, a rare treat.

Even the home stretch from Orleans to Rockcliffe looks mysteriously different in these conditions, with the patterns made by roads, trails and other man-made features of the landscape very distinctive.

The lumber factory on the Quebec side of the river opposite Kettle Island is another location where rust red buildings and pale brown heaps of sawdust relieve the monotony of their surroundings at this time of year. The steam from the chimneys was rising straight up when we set off but blowing east to west when we came in to land. A wind picking up from the east is another predictor of rain in the near future.

Conversations in French and German

It was becoming difficult for me to find enough time to carry on arranging and hosting the weekly conversations of my German-speaking group, as I've been doing since 2014, so in September I asked for help and got some. Marie Danielle offered to halve my workload by taking responsibility for our meetings every other week.

While it was still warm enough, we had a couple of meetings out of doors, in Mooney's Bay and Rockcliffe Park, though of course the people who participate from outside Canada couldn't join in then. Otherwise we have continued to meet by Zoom with either me or Marie Danielle as the host, and it's never hard to find a subject to read about and talk about. At the start of the season we read about the Austrian mathematician who won the Olympic gold medal in cycling this summer, Anna Kiesenhofer, then about the lighthouse in the mountains that marks the source of the Rhine and the new footbridge that crosses the Rhine from Strasbourg to Kehl considerably further downstream. We spoke of favourite Christmas recipes, the last time we met; some of us held up to the camera what we had been baking. This made for a pleasant end to the year, particularly as Vjia was playing Christmas music on the piano while we were arriving. Uschi signed in from Berlin and Judith from Vienna. Our Viennese connection made a good impression on Ariane, our new member, representing Afghanistan, meeting our group for the first time, who had learned to speak German when she lived in Vienna and wants to practise.

There have been a few meetings of the French conversation group as well, on Mondays, with some of the same people overlapping. Marie Danielle leads those sessions and she too welcomes diplomats to the circle, Ariane again, for example and Socorro from Brazil. We've read Proust's famous passage about tasting the evocative madeleine, and an extract from the French-Canadian novel, Maria Chapdelaine (also a popular film). It's an education for me to hear about Quebec culture; recently we discussed Un Noël canadian français: what are their habits, what do they eat? Their réveillon meal after midnight mass on Christmas day is served in the middle of the night after a day-long fast, which would have been a recipe for disaster in our family. To cope with this, you'd need a stomach of iron:

...un souper [...] comprenait des tourtières, un rôti de porc, des patates et des pâtisseries. Les desserts communs des fêtes incluaient la tarte aux œufs à la muscade, la tarte à la farlouche (mélasse), la tarte au suif, la tarte au sucre, la tarte au vinaigre blanc ou de cidre, les biscuits et les gâteaux de Savoie.

Jessica and friends in the mud

Twice this year, in August and November, we saw our teenager friend Jessica in Ottawa, who's now in her last year of high school, exploring a variety of hairstyles and ideas for her future. She cares greatly about animal welfare, but Art and Maths interest her too; it will be interesting to see what path she chooses next. On both visits Chris took her flying, on the second occasion with her cousin Roland. Some passengers like taking control of the aircraft, some do not; Jessica does!

The weekend she stayed at our house was a good occasion for getting in touch with the German family she got to know in 2018, so I invited them to a Zoom meeting at breakfast time / mid-afternoon, and the two girls, Jessica and Toni (whose English after a year living in New Zealand is now flawless) spent a good hour happily catching up with one another's news. I found that very rewarding to witness, since Chris, I, and Jessica's aunt Carol, had introduced the girls to one another back in 2017, a long time ago from their perspective, when they were 12 / 13 years old.

  

Sunday November 21 was a wet, grey, and muddy day, as we discovered when I had the silly idea of taking Jessica for a walk in the Chelsea woods, with Carol, Elva and Laurie along. Jessica called this walk "a team-building exercise" because the trail was so slippery and steep. Setting off from the parking lot opposite St. Stephen's Church we meandered through the new housing development to the banks of Chelsea Creek and then across a series of hurdles on the trail through the woods, crossing bridges and climbing up and down flights of steps, having to hang on to fences, trees and helpfully proffered hands and dead branches on the way, to avoid falling into the mud. Nobody actually sat in the mud, but it was close, and our boots took an hour to clean, that evening. We finished the walk in the sombre old cemetery, where the dates of death at a young age, carved on the gravestones rising from the turf, imply hardship for Chelsea's 19th century settlers.

At the beginning and end of the weekend Jessica took the Toronto-Ottawa-Toronto train.

Lunch out with cardamom-flavoured coffee

It was a strangely unfamiliar experience to wear smart shoes and go out to lunch, especially when lunch was at the reception hall of the Embassy of the United Arab Emirates. A few of our Diplomatic Hospitality group had been invited there as a treat. 

 

We were coaxed into sampling a whole range of Middle East and North African specialities personally prepared by members of the embassies that took part (the UAE, Yemen, Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia, Iraq, Sudan, Lebanon) with such delicious flavours in the ingredients!— Mediterranean herbs and spices in the savoury dishes, rose water in the desserts. It was healthy food too; it's rare that I consume so much without suffering any indigestion afterwards. To drink, Yemeni coffee or Iraqi tea, Rarkadeh, lemonade or chai was served, no wine of course. 

The cheerful atmosphere was intoxicating enough without alcohol. A musician played dance music on a Syrian lute and the Ambassadors' wives who were our hostesses moved gracefully around the room in their national clothes, greeting everyone and encouraging us to dance.

The Humanics Institute

A walk in the woods in October, just east of Cumberland, took six of us by surprise. It had been my idea to come here. We knew that sculptures had been installed, but we hadn't anticipated how many of them there would be and of what good quality. 

The installation is seasonal (i.e. not viewable in the winter months) and is a project of the Humanics Institute that aims to teach people, without being too dogmatic about it, that the religions of this world have striking similarities. I agree with the implication that one of the things we should all be searching for, in this life, is the vision we have in common:

• [W]hile acknowledging that differences exist, we believe that the commonalities in our religious beliefs, spirituality, race, ethnicity, culture and nationality ultimately unite us. 

• [W]hile celebrating diversity, we strive to advance the awareness that we are not fundamentally different from one another.

The elderly gentleman who created this "Sanctuary and Sculpture Park", is Ranjit Perera, President of the Humanics Institute, who's originally from Sri Lanka where some of the sculpture comes from. I assume his upbringing was Hindu. Many of the other pieces are modern imports from Zimbabwe. The site is still under construction with more to come, so the owners hope. The walk around the site, up and down slopes and crossing a stream in a steep valley a couple of times, which we did in the rain with our umbrellas up, encourages a pause at each station where sculptures are placed, and meditation on the three principles common to all religions:

1. The Oneness of Reality ... interpreted [variously] as Brahma, or Yahweh, or Buddha the Enlightened One, or God or Allah, or the Great Spirit 
2. Equality -- All humans are responsible beings, born free and equal in dignity and rights
3. Interconnection -- There is an intrinsic relationship between human beings individually and collectively, and the natural and the cosmic environment around them

The phrase I underlined above is frequently repeated on the explanatory boards. 

Some of the three-dimensional artworks appear in groups, like the animals (horse, giraffe, elephant, etc.) made from pieces of metal near the driveway, and there are areas where people can gather for a wedding or to learn about the institute under a canvas awning. They had some fruit juice to hand out but to Elva's chagrin on that damp and chilly morning, no coffee. That would have been a touch too secular, perhaps.

We all came away thinking deep thoughts, but also hungry for lunch, so we stopped at a restaurant of good repute in the village of Cumberland with the peculiar name of Maker Feed Co. (it's a former farming supplies store) and were lucky to be seated on very fancy chairs at the only table available, for a posher-than-average brunch. 

That place, too, was a worthwhile discovery, rather pricey, but special, in an old stone house with white-painted verandas and balconies. The chef uses locally farmed products in his dishes.

Melting ice

Philip Porter, son of a friend of mine from the 1980s, has 30 years’ experience of studying why and how glaciers melt. He is shocked by the recent acceleration of this phenomenon, leading to a rise in sea levels and increased sediment in rivers, lakes and oceans. Nutrient delivery to nearby ecosystems is also affected by changing levels of salinity in the water. Around the globe, currents and energy systems are changing, as rainfall and warmer summers in the Arctic melt more ice. 

 This summer Phil was at a research station on Spitzbergen island in the Barentz Sea, at a latitude of >78° North, where the early 20th century Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen once stopped on his expedition to the North Pole in the ship called Fram (which I saw at its resting place in Oslo). 

On October 18th I hosted a meeting for my Environment Action group and guests at which Phil as the invited speaker told us how hydrologists monitor the flow of water through the Spitzbergen glaciers. 

 A fluorometer is used to detect the channels through which (purposely dyed) water flows underground and disperses overground. He described abseiling down a 60 metre deep “moulin” through a crevasse in the ice, a laser scanner helping his team to observe the formation of these underground channels — a terrifying but awe-inspiring experience! 

Phil has observed glaciers in the Arctic, the Hindu Kush, the Andes and the Alps. He explained how the phenomenon of glaciers surging forward is linked to the passage of water at their base. It does not mean that they are growing; many are drying up. It is sobering to think that, in the far east, a fifth of the world’s population directly relies on the water from ice-melt being predictable. Our imports of food and energy also depend on the reliability of these water sources. 

Rapidly melting glaciers are an indicator of “the biggest crisis humanity has ever had to face.” However, we should not be fatalistic and despairing. Education is essential; the best means of education is word of mouth. And the “first and quickest solution” to global warming is for each of us to reduce our consumption of unnecessary things. Phil said we should lobby our elected representatives more vigorously, as well. He finished his presentation by reminding us of the Serenity Prayer, adding a phrase of his own: “Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage and the energy to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.” This is a message we could all relate to.