The Widow We Do Now? podcast continues to be an important source of support, solace, and inspiration. Last week’s episode featuring Constance Dahlbäck was particularly affecting, both for her reflections on life with her late partner, and on the life she’s living now.

The podcast has a companion private Facebook group, the “Widow Wives Club,” that has proved similarly helpful: having a space to blargh into, a space that’s safe, non-judgemental, and filled with people who know the terrain, that’s saved my emotional hide more than once over the last year.

A few days ago I posted this in the group:

I’ve realized recently that the process of supporting Catherine through 6 years of living with, and ultimately dying from, cancer made me feel like I was 75 years old: all that time in hospitals and hospice, all that fragility, all that ever-closer end.

But I’m not 75 years old, I’m 55 years old. And getting a handle on that, and remembering how to do that, that’s a thing.

Does anybody else feel this way?

This was a thought that emerged in a session with my therapist last week, a new conception for a discontinuity-with-everyone-else I’d been feeling for a long time.

The reaction to the post warmed my heart: I thought perhaps this was something I was uniquely feeling, but from the many replies starting with “YES!!” and “Every waking hour” and “Absolutely!” it seems like I put words to something many who spent a long time supporting a partner with an incurable illness experienced.

I met Catherine when I was 25; to emerge from the DeLorean of grief at age 55, after having spent a long season feeling 75, well, who the hell am I anyway?

I guess figuring that out is what’s next.

Through this WWF panel discussion at COP26 I was introduced to Sandrine Dixson-Declève, Co-President of The Club of Rome, and seeking further context I found my way to her presentation on the 1.5-Degree Lifestyles Report. From her talk:

I would like to first start by reminding everyone that actually a lot of this discussion already started in 1972 with The Limits to Growth, and I just want to read something that I think is absolutely fundamental when we talk about systems change and lifestyle change, which was already said and pronounced in 1972 by Donella Meadows:

“People don’t need enormous cars, they need admiration and respect; they don’t need a constant stream of new clothes, they need to feel that others consider them to be attractive, and they need excitement and variety and beauty; they don’t need electronic entertainment they need something interesting to occupy their minds and emotion…”

While there’s a back-to-the-land quality to Meadows’ words, the larger notion that when we’re looking at systems change we should be looking at the fundamentals, not one-for-one replacement, remains vital.

This is, for example, a place where the shift to electric vehicles needs a closer look: we tend to look at this issue as “we need to replace our bad cars with good cars,” when we would be better served by framing the issue as “we need a way of getting from place to place” (or, even better, by asking “do we really need to get from place to place so much?”).

The Club of Rome played a larger-than-life role in the environmental history of Prince Edward Island; as the late Andy Wells told me when I interviewed him in 2009:

The first thing I came across was a videotape of the Club of Rome, and I persuaded [Premier] Alex [Campbell] to bring his whole cabinet together and to come down and sit in the viewing room and we played this video, and Alex converted immediately; he understood the problem. 

From Wade MacLauchlan’s biography of Premier Campbell, Alex B. Campbell: The Prince Edward Island Premier who Rocked the Cradle:

The economic positions that Campbell articulated as early as 1967 can be seen as a quest for local specificity, viability, esteem and quality of life. He promoted a vision for Canada’s national economy based on competitive and complementary regional inputs. His practical quest was for self-reliance for Prince Edward Island and the Atlantic region. In philosophical terms, Campbell’s arguments were a forerunner of debates about globalization that dominated the 1980s, or ongoing debates about the environment and limits to growth.

Campbell’s quest for “local specificity, viability, esteem and quality of life” finds echoes in The 1.5-Degree Lifestyles Report:

The focus of this report is on lifestyles and climate change. Lifestyles embrace much more than just consumption patterns and behaviours. Lifestyles include non-economic aspects of our lives, such as caring for children or elderly parents, spending time with our friends, play, engaging in voluntary work, activism, or supporting a local campaign or political party. All of these potentially affect, directly or indirectly, our well- being and our carbon footprint. Lifestyles are how we consume, and also how we relate to one another, what kind of neighbours, friends, citizens, and parents we are, what kinds of values we nurture, and how we let those values drive our choices.

These issues are largely missing from recent local political discussion of climate change mitigation and adaptation, which has primarily focused on the technical aspects of lowering GHGs, and has not taken a larger view of the lifestyle changes that will necessarily underpin the societal transformation we should be in the midst of right now if we’re going to meet our climate commitments. The depth of the political discussion rarely strays beyond “things can stay much the same, just with heat pumps and solar panels and bike paths,” and almost completely absent is a drive to seek consensus on how we will spend the much, much smaller carbon budget we’ll have in a just fashion.

I managed to keep our kitchen free from fruit flies for almost two years; I took this as a sign that I’m an impeccable housekeeper, but was disabused of this by others who told me that the city has been generally fruit fly free during this period.

This week, however, they are back with abandon, at 2004 battle strength.

Yes, I’ve tried the beer, the wine, the apple cider vinegar; the only thing that gives me any sense of control is vacuuming them up, which is ineffective but at least temporarily satisfying.

I got it into my head that it would be a perfectly reasonable thing to print on two inch wide paper tape with the Golding Jobber № 8.

Paper tape turns out to be really sticky, and so its natural inclination is to stick to the type, and thus get sucked into the rollers. This is not a good thing. To prevent this, I printed each impression, quickly stopped the press before the danger of sucking was upon me, rolled out another few feet of tape, and repeated. It’s by no means a perfectly registered job, or even, really, a registered job at all.

But it kind of worked. And the result will appear in the vestibule of 100 Prince Street once it’s dry.

I’m (very) slowly breathing new life into our living room. First up, a new area rug from IKEA.

Back in the day ordering online from IKEA meant long waits and exorbitant delivery fees; no longer: I ordered the rug on Monday night and it arrived Thursday morning and shipping was just $24.

Redecorating is equal parts therapeutic and really, really hard; my next step is to replace the sofa that Catherine and I bought in 1998, our first real non-futon adult furniture purchase.

I think Yazoo Mills is my new favourite company. I really wish I had a compelling need for cores or tubes.

Their FAQ page is particularly notable, inasmuch as it appears to actually contain questions that are frequently asked, among which:

What’s the difference between a tube and a core?

A tube is used to put something inside and a core denotes that something is wound onto it.

Do you have any minimums?

We have no minimums. We will make you a single tube, box full, or a truckload.

What lengths can you do?

Any length up to 53 feet.

A 53 foot tube! The mind boggles with possibilities.

I also like that they include the FAQ titled “Services We Do Not Offer”: all company websites should include this section. 

As part of trying to restore access to my disabled Instagram account, which I do now only for sport, without a sense of urgency, I received this very unusual error message from Facebook (even though, at the time, I wasn’t “on Facebook,” but rather “on Instagram”). I’ve written my fair share of error messages in my day, but I don’t think I’ve ever achieved this surreal height.

See also You Need To Calm Down.

Where is the Heart of My Country by Caitlin Canty is a lovely song that opens with the verse:

It’s raining in Los Angeles hallelujah hallelu
Moonflowers open to breathe the night’s perfume
The city climbs the hillside 
Just to see the color bloom
Petals turn a sidewalk stream jacaranda blue

Jacaranda blue turns out to be the perfect use-case for Google Image Search: