Every year at this time I watch as our garden begins to revive itself. Winter is long, and it’s hard to imagine life beneath the soil. And so it always feels like a tiny miracle when the trees and plants, seemingly from one day to the next, sprout buds. Ordinary, extraordinary miracles reminding us to trust nature, and that all things must end to begin again.
We so rarely see sink skirts anymore and I don’t know why because they’re charming. Okay, so there’s the obvious impracticality of spilling mouth wash all over your vintage Guatemalan textile, but really, who doesn’t love to floss over a bustle of fancy fabric? I’d brush my teeth all day at this marble sink, and this candy cane fabric brings the circus to a country kitchen. My favourite is this gorgeous stripe; I love it so much that I wish it was an actual skirt!
The first and last time that I had a space of my own was in the winter of 1997 when I moved into a tiny attic apartment in an old palazzo next to a shawarma shop in Florence. I remember the weight of the huge wooden doors –– likely Medieval –– that I walked through everyday for the six months that I lived there. My flat was tiny, with little more than a bed and a canvas futon in the way of furniture and a kitchen so small that only one person could fit in it at a time. I had views of the terracotta rooftops below me and traveled through the building in one of those vintage birdcage elevators. Over time, I added spider plants and vases filled with Mimosa. I put books on shelves and postcards on the walls. I bought a pepper mill and cushions for my futon. By spring, Jason (who I had met on Valentine’s Day) had moved all his clothes into the cupboard beside the pots and pans. It became our apartment. All the many people we met at school and in nightclubs came back to the flat for late night arrabiata and endless games of Rummy. It was the meeting place, and I was happy to host. So many years later, I have rented a tiny attic studio in an old church rectory in downtown Toronto. It’s small and poky with no kiln or proper sink, and it’s kind of perfect. Maybe, mostly, because it’s mine.
There was a period that I visited a chiropractor as often as people buy milk. I was sapped of energy and often in pain. It was around that time that I started to think about change as a series of minuscule adjustments rather than one sudden thing. It’s advice I’d often given others; tiny steps versus giant leaps. But we teach best what we most need to learn. Drink more water. Start the day with a cold shower. Wake up with the sun. Over time, tiny steps form giant leaps. “The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.” It’s a shame this quote is so cloying because it really is true. Adjust. That I can do. An adjustment is small and manageable. Change is inevitable, and whether it comes about as a positive or a negative is often down to the day to day adjustments that we do or do not make. I am the slowest moving tortoise, let’s call me a giant galápagos, but even the giant galápagos moves a couple of kilometers each day.
For several years my family has travelled to a small island on the Gulf Coast side of Florida for beach walks and grouper sandwiches. The sand there feels like pastry flour and is laced with a million shells from cockles and lightening whelks to rough scallops and calico clams. If you’re really lucky, you may even find a sand dollar or a dried-up starfish. Shelling takes time and patience. My largest shells are from Irene’s house. All the best shells wash up on her little beach. Irene and my Mum have been fiends since childhood and no visit to Anna Maria is complete without a drive over the bridge to her weathered clapboard on Longboat Key. Most of the shells have some imperfection –– a small crack, a chip or some discolouration –– but they’re still so beautiful. This time, I found two large Southern Quahogs, chalky white with rough lines on the outside, and a fighting conch (the ones with the jagged spires at the top). I also brought home a bag of broken seashells; teeny, tiny fragments that I’ll piece together to make something whole. Eventually, I hope to take shells collected over many years and mount them on some lovely fabric, but in the meantime, they live in pockets and drawers and inside my shoes.
My grandmother was a Bostonian of Irish descent, a heritage somewhat washed out by all the Greeks in the house. I remember her making beer battered shrimp a few times, (that must have originated in somebody’s Nan’s kitchen?) but other than that, my very Greek Papou did all the cooking. I’m not sure I even knew my Yiayia wasn’t Greek until my teens, which given her terrible Greek accent and strawberry blonde hair shows how very up my own arse I was. She had freckles on every part of her body and wore yellow visors bedazzled with jewel encrusted frogs. She was a very young grandmother, seventeen-years younger than my grandfather, and after he died she only lived three short, sharp years without him. I came to visit her the Spring before she died at the apartment they had shared in North Palm Beach and within minutes of arrival we were at the local karaoke (a cafeteria in a nearby plaza) with my grandmother on stage (a chair) singing Engelbert Humperdinck’s “Please Release Me,” followed by Irish super ballad, “Danny Boy.” She was wearing a cream cotton pant suit that night. Or maybe it was spearmint satin. My memory is froggy. She died a year later and “Danny Boy” played at her wake. And six-months after that, I sat on her memorial bench in Central Park and listened to the same Irish ballad singing at The Boathouse nearby.
The first pair of designer shoes I ever bought were cream with red piping and a kitten heel so small that they were almost flats. I think I was just as excited about the felt shoe bag as I was the shoes. Marc Jacobs. I wore them everywhere, and with everything. Skinny jeans, check. Tea dresses, check. To the cinema, out to dinner, in the grass. I have no idea where they are now. Did I give them away? Throw them away? Are they in my mother-in-law’s North York basement with all the other sartorial relics? What I loved most about the shoe is that it exposed the perfect amount of toe cleavage, not too much, not too little, and that the leather softened with every party and every mad dash for the 22 bus. The 22 bus that took me straight home. These pink leather beauties (with a point like my MJ’s ) are from the 1800s. Fashion is cyclical. So is life.
As luck would have it, I found myself in the east end this morning walking past the vegetable sellers and coffee shops of Gerrard. There was a time when I spent a lot of time east of the Don River scouring antique shops for old lamps and fabric trims and scoffing down pancakes at some diner or another. Our home was filled with things snapped up on lazy Sundays in Leslieville. A Finn Juhl chair (or so we were told) upholstered in tangerine microsuede. A wooden bowl shaped like a pineapple. Mid-century salt and pepper shakers. One of my first jobs out of journalism college was at a design magazine with a tiny office in a building on River Street. My first byline there was an article on a beautiful Siamak Hariri project with a white spiral staircase not so dissimilar to the one in our home. The best ideas need time to percolate. To travel through. These days, I’m rarely in the east end. I rarely leave the Annex, to be honest. My world is small and intense. And when I do step out, like I did today, I discover a world of nostalgia and possibility.
Sometimes, maquettes can be more beautiful than the object they were made for. There’s something about the diminutive version that’s so appealing. I love to look at Henry Moore’s plaster maquettes at the AGO. Positioned in a glass case just outside a vast room of his reclining figures, his maquettes offer a glimpse into the sculptor’s process. We can picture his fingers moving across the plaster, the entire figure resting in his hands. Moore aimed for monumentality in his work and his small maquettes are infused with as much of it as his larger works. For the last few weeks, I’ve been making paper maquettes of things I am either working on, or would like to work on in clay. Paper is cheap, and making a paper vase takes ten minutes versus the hours and hours that I pour into a clay one, and so I come to each one with a levity and irreverence that’s refreshing. I like them a lot, and while they lack the permanence of clay, they are feeding something in me that I hope will live on.
Long time readers know about my penchant for fancy powder rooms so it’ll come as no surprise that when we finally renovated our home it was the loo that got the most attention. “Must we have a toilet,” I half joked to the contractor. Even the chicest potties are an eyesore. And don’t get me started on the flush plates. Designers go to great lengths to disguise the toilet. Nicky Haslam has a bespoke commode in the guest loo of his London flat and Maria Speake’s of Retrouvius uses elaborate wallpapers to distract us from from the toilet bowl. We opted for one of those floating designs, and in a moment of madness I considered a black model –– so 80’s –– so that it would blend into the midnight blue walls. I came to my senses, and in the end, I barely notice the loo anymore. That is, unless I’m scouring it. But if I ever design another one, I’m splashing out on a Delfts blue Victorian loo with a mahogany seat. Because, why not?
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