Supposing the winter will end...

The hour lost, but there's spring to be gained.  It's close... at least the sun certainly feels closer at hand, giving off true warmth at midday.  Finally.

oh spring where art thou?

What a thing, this sad sad spring.

I've been woe-eyed watching my tiny urban garden plot, still mostly unloved, waiting, ever waiting.

Last year the tulips had come and gone, the small herb plants were already happily setting down roots, tomatoes out and caged and bean sprouts pushing up, anxious to climb the fence towards the sun.

But this year it's wet, it's cold and yes, it's a sad sad spring.

I'm trying hard not to let it get me down, reminding myself that Canada isn't exactly a gardeners paradise of weather, and to instead force myself to take a lesser (though still prideful) pleasure in my first seedlings scrambling towards their indoor fluorescent incubator lights.  I decided to grow some of my harvest from seed this year, but given the longer-than-usual winter I delayed my seeding until the very last reasonable moment, and yet still the little guys are getting too big and leggy to stay indoors for much longer.  They also long for better weather... and yet.

And yet, here we are, May long weekend (the usual gardener's delight) and not much joy to be found among my neighbours (urban gardeners all), who could be counted on in past years to be out tilling and planting and pruning and tending the long weekend away...

We'll get through this.  The vagaries of weather are also a hallmark of our Canadian lifestyle.  But after the depressing and long winter cold, the ice-storm(s) and snow blasts, the tentative slips and the too-rare sunshine, I only hope we get a break.  And soon.

define "sober"...

Quite obviously, what's top of mind for an exiled Ottawanian such as myself is the three-way Senate shame show currently underway on the Hill.  I'm fairly certain if ever I'm in a position of power, for example PM of Canada, I shall think twice before appointing any professional communicators (especially journalists!) to life term senior legislative posts.  And I shall think twice (if not thrice) before engaging them in a PR battle over (quite frankly) trumped up administrative charges to do with their travel claims (of all things).  Oh yes, in Canada such things do a scandal make...

But really, the very qualities that made Duffy and Wallin such ideal CPC aristocrats, sharp-tongued efficacy in the case of the former, and patrician (yet suitably partisan) gravitas in the case of the latter, have certainly made for a series of VERY bad days in the PMO that first appointed them.  On second thought it might have been best to stick with more Brazeau-esque mediocrities, far easier to ignore when political exigencies (and fiscal bloodthirst from "the base") demand public firings to right all perceived wrongs.  I mean his speech was OK, but compared with Duffy's Deus Profundis Spenthriftus Maximus, or Wallin's Great Expectations (But Unclear Travel Policies) oratories, Brazeau's feeble "Stephen Harper, you lost my vote," pleadings have made him the least compelling (or quoted) player in this high political drama.

The great question begged (and begged, and begged...) by all of this: why do we bother with this partisan gong show, known as the Senate of Canada, in the first place?  I mean really, has the Senate's "sober second thought" mantra ever seemed more of a grim joke than today?

Duffy and Wallin are not victims, that much has to be said.  Nobody who gets a surprise second career doing year-round stump speeches and working the $1000/plate fundraising dinner circuit can lay claim to anything approaching the label of "hard done by."

Brazeau was not a great choice for the Senate, and his rude treatment by CPC operatives is clearly a far cry from the promises made at the start of this patronage journey, but he's done more damage to himself than has anyone else, and so his dismissal makes a certain kind of sense.  Even if the terms are a bit hazy...

Except.  Well, except all of that is subjective, anecdotal and deeply unfair in the light of due process.  Because really, the other great question begged: what does one do when Senators behave badly?

Nobody has provided any objective answer to this most salient of questions, but instead a highly improvised (and highly paid) kangaroo court has been convened.  What Duffy and Wallin (and to a lesser extent Brazeau) have argued, to my mind effectively, is that for this to be anything but the end of the Senate, the Senate does in fact have to do its purported job and rise to this challenge. It must second guess a hastily drafted motion to summarily fire three members, and it must defer the allegations and possible consequences to a formal committee to study this whole thing in greater detail. In plainest terms, the Senate must affirm that due process takes time and that no motions will be considered until all the facts are known, all evidence is gathered, and all parties can have their proverbial 'day in court.'

And if I believe that the above will actually come to pass, it's high time I finally sobered up myself.

spring now please...

The browner bits are slowly sloughing off as tiny green shoots emerge, slowly, slowly, signaling a far more careful start to spring this year.  Looking back to last spring our backyard shrub had fragrantly burst with lilacs, there were multicoloured tulips aplenty and even the first little herb seeds were breaking out with tiny leaves by this point.

The psychology of the Canadian winter is complicated, bound up with our identity, our history and our perverse love/hate of the true north strong and free at minus thirty degrees with windchill.  And relief from the last long months is always too long in the coming, as we anxiously await the great bipolar moment of our annual spring awakening (itself a prelude to a sweltering summer, but nevermind...).  For anything is better than the waiting, the in-between-ness of a cool spring season, too cool for gardening (that great Canadian palliative to weather extremes), and yet warm enough to entice us outside, where our conversation quickly turns to how much warmer it was last year, as we zip up our light jackets to stave off the air's lingering chill.

And yet our patience is always rewarded, or it is for those with the industry and inclinations of that other season, the one for wandering and playing, swimming and cottages, yard work and the family vegetable patch, the smell of lilacs bursting forth, the first wave of colour and the feeling of life again on display after cold dark months in hiding.

All that to say, this weekend the patio furniture is going out (for isn't the first beer in the sun on a Saturday afternoon the real proof of spring's awakening?).

something i read today that i enjoyed enough to share with you...

This is a lovely interview/profile piece about the wife of literary critic James Wood, the novelist Claire Messud, who I'm embarrassed to say I hadn't heard of before today.

It's certainly worth the fifteen or so minutes required to give it a read, and I'll now be adding some Messud works to my every-growing reading list.

The final paragraphs are particularly enjoyable for those of us who by turns battle and embrace our all-too-human contradictions.  

something i enjoyed...

There is a special place in my heart reserved for people so dedicated to language and writing that it utterly transforms their fundamental relationship with the world around them.

If you also have a soft spot for 'wordies' then you'll enjoy this as much as I did.

quote of the day...

"Just because everything is different doesn't mean anything has changed."

- Baz Kershaw, 'The Radical in Performance'