240131 starlings

 Jan. 31, 2024

Winter starlings : In the fall, starlings change from dark brown to speckled, but with their short tails and their propensity to travel in large groups they are easy to identify. They chatter loudly and constantly, like a gathering of children in a schoolyard.

We came home to Toronto this week. I was actually excited to be here, to see friends and family. The five weeks in Quebec felt like months and we felt rested and renewed by the break. There was snow and the fire, and the open space of the vineyard. It was quiet and peaceful.

Rocky and I walk in the field twice daily. It keeps us in touch with nature, the sky, the trees and the wildlife. While many of the trees in the city are full and uniform in shape, since they are in tended gardens, this loner is in someone's back yard beside the hydro field. Its wild beauty draws my eye every day.

In this tangle of tree and grapevine is a grey bird, which I could not clearly identify. It is either a gray jay or a mockingbird. The gray jay only rarely comes down to the lower great lakes and I have never seen one in Toronto, while the mockingbird summers here but retreats to below the lakes for winter. Since the weather has been above zero so much I would not be surprised to find that a mockingbird is hanging around. But the jay - since it is so warm, why would it be down here? That long tail held up suggests a mocker, not a jay.

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Rooibos tea:

K's father was born in South Africa. His mother, Cameron, spent a year with K senior's family before she married, to learn their language and ways. (Was that not brave? It awes me that she would throw herself into her upcoming marriage with such energy. My own mother came from England to Canada on her own, after her marriage, while my father finished his Air Force tour. She went all the way to south Saskatchewan to live with her in-laws.) Cameron and K senior did not return to South Africa however, as they had planned. It seems that the country did not want foreign trained doctors, although when K senior wanted to study, there were no medical schools in South Africa, so he went to Scotland, where he met Cameron. K was born in great Britain, but when the family decided to emigrate to a new home, they chose Canada. Straight from Aberdeen to the smallest town in Saskatchewan, several hundred miles north of my father's home town.K senior was a surgeon, although I think that he must have done a variety of doctor services, being in a small, small town!

I bring this up because I have been looking for rooibos tea, plain, not with ginger, or chocolate or cinnamon, just plain. Today I finally found some. Rooibos, or red bush, tea, has no caffeine but it seems to have its own small kick, and unlike many herbal tissanes it has a robust flavour of a real tea. In my childhood home, tea was the beverage, since my mother was English and coffee was an expensive luxury in our house. There was a pot of tea every couple of hours, and anyone who was home would come to the kitchen, for a minute or twenty. When I see it from here, I understand that these tea meetings were the bonding that kept our family close. For twenty years the house was full of young adults from 13 to 30. The five of us were twelve to twenty-four through the sixties and seventies, while friends wandered in and out, staying an hour or a week. We, the children, that is, left and returned for many years before we found our others and our own homes. It was always time for tea. But Cameron introduced me to rooibos, in those days, she had it sent from South Africa by the pound. I am writing in circles, like a "cloud" of starlings, myself! 

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I am still swirling from the drive here. It was classic, a winter storm, freezing rain on the 401. I felt a sense of ability on the drive. It was nowhere near as bad as I have driven in. Some of the big trucks raced past in the left lane, pushing other drivers before them. But the occasional truck stayed, steady and slow, in the right lane, and I followed them.  

I wanted to drive on and get to toronto that night. But the sensible thing was to stop at Gananoque, where we had a motel booked . Rocky and K both needed the rest and I, as the only driver, should, if prudent, stop for the night. The freezing rain stopped early in the night and the roads were fine for the rest of the drive to Toronto. With the dry conditions and the light traffic, I made good time and we were in Etobicoke by one o'clock. 

Is this becoming a February thing? - early springlike days, wet, cloudy, but six degrees, coat open, dog very muddy coming home. It is nice, this warmth, in the city, where winter can be dirty and feel very cold. But snow is nice too, and seeing the city caught under snow is refreshing, reminds us that we make a thin veneer on the natural world, which encroaches easily and forcefully with storm and wind. 

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Mumma Yaga