Spring settled in, slowly at first. Here’s a picture of a mid-April snowfall. We’re in Northern Ontario now, temporarily, where we are spending time with family and where I am working on a new writing project.

The landscape is beautiful and there are 330 lakes to explore here. Fewer than ten within comfortable walking distance, but that’s still nine more than I’m used to visiting regularly. (Toronto is on Lake Ontario, one of the five Great Lakes in Canada, which schoolchildren memorize using HOMES, in which the O stands for Lake Ontario. Now the S is our closest Great Lake.) I learn something new everyday and, because most of the streets here have more than one name, I get lost frequently—so often the new thing that I learn is how to find my way back home again.

My concentration was wobbly so I started a lot of books and only imagined finishing them. In April, I reread most of Elizabeth von Arnim’s Enchanted April: an old favourite that felt familiar when little else did. It has a delightful ending, but I still haven’t finished rereading that part. I started to reread Lettice Cooper’s The New House, too, which I loved reading the last time we moved (waves to Helen), but it remains undone as well.

When it was time for #1954Club, I started to reread Robertson Davies’ Tempest-Tost, with an eye to continuing with the second volume of the series. It’s funny and filled with small-town hijinks, but am a long way from done, and the celebratory week for its 1954 follow-up, Leaven of Malice, is long past.

Ahead of time, I pulled Daphne du Maurier’s Hungry Hill off the shelf, with DDM ReadingWeek in mind, but I quickly began to muddle the talk of mining country in England with the first volume of Katharine Susannah Prichard’s trilogy about life in Australian mining country. So, I thought I would finish Prichard first and still have not finished that either, let alone returned to DDM for her special week.

In the meantime, while I was not reading any of those books, I got a visitor’s card for the library here; I borrowed children’s stories to read with young family members, French magazines, and a jigsaw puzzle. The weather warmed and my reading warmed too.

Ken Kimura’s 999 Frogs Wake Up (illustrated by Yasunari Murakami) was in my mind, when I crossed the field with the small waterway frequented by geese and ducks and heard the frogs singing as the temperatures rose. Along the broader shorelines, I thought about Roy Henry Vickers’ and Robert Budd’s Cloudwalker, and wondered how much longer it will take for me to find a moose here.

And I absolutely adored Marianne Dubuc’s Le chemin de la montagne about how we share pathways through forests and time, about connections we make along the way, and how important the small creatures and moments in ordinary days are, how they accumulate and help us to build a life and memories. It inspired me to sketch an exploring route nearby and, when it rained, when I could not go out and walk, I worked on the puzzle.

In the Dubuc story, there is talk of lemonade and, by this time, it had grown hot enough to make the first batch of the season. It was tart and cold and, sitting on the deck outside, a space not far off the size of our previous living space, the gardens were greening and a mass of plants, seemingly untended for a few years, began to emerge. At first it was all green, and then the phlox burst forth. A few lilies of the valley poked out their stems.

Then it got hotter and the two youngest girls (six and seven) picked dandelions and then helped to peel off their blossoms, so their mom and I could make dandelion jelly. And up here there are Mason jars to buy, whereas they had been backordered in the city since the pandemic first took hold. And, suddenly, it was warm enough to make lilac jelly too. And toast has not been the same since.

Up here, the population is 40% francophone, and spending time with little French readers does encourage my language skills. Reading Dubuc’s charming story, I learned that “abeilles bourdonnantes” means “buzzing bees” and even though my concentration remains fractured, the articles I stumble through in French remind me of the subjects that soon I’ll return to reading about in English books.

But, for now, I’m reading Mémé a la plage by Rhéa Dufresne (illustrated by Aurélie Grand). Because it is hot enough now to think of beaches. And I am not quite ready to resume my booklength reading in English about climate change and erosion and plastic pollution of waterways and declining salmon species. Spoiler alert: when Mémé’s reading is interrupted, she gets wise to the commotion and finds herself a quiet place to read (she doesn’t look as grumpy inside the book as she does on the cover).

In a few days, I’ll have more to say about reading for Indigenous History Month, and I’ll catch up with posts on the remaining Alistair MacLeod stories (saving the final two for next month, to mark his birthday) and Audre Lorde’s essays. And I’ll share some more photographs of the landscape and these surroundings: it’s a good reminder, when you take up temporary lodgings, that life is short and that making the most of every moment is the best way to lengthen our experience in the here and now.

That’s what’s been happening over here, with me. Now, how about you?