So keep repeating it's the berries
The strongest oak must fall
The sweet things in life, to you were just loaned
So how can you lose what you've never owned?
Life is just a bowl of cherries
So live and laugh at it all.
– from “Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries,”
by Lew Brown and Ray Henderson
Sometime in the early eighties, when my children were still children and I was still in a position to show them the world, we drove to a mountain pass near the border between Alberta and British Columbia. Despite our altitude, we were sweltering in the summer heat. Parked in front of us was a semi-trailer with its back doors open, displaying what looked like an endless supply of fruit. For the next two days we enjoyed a large basket of peaches from a mythical neverland called the Okanagan.
When farmers’ markets were open In Ottawa in the summer, I sought out fresh Niagara fruit, plums and peaches and apricots and cherries that had been trucked overnight from Beamsville or Jordan. One of the dreams that tantalized me for years was to move to Niagara, to a region where I would not have to buy unripe fruit in the supermarket and to try — often without success — to guess when it was ready to eat.
The reality of living in Kelowna makes my earlier dreams pale. Because it is a bureaucratic nightmare to convert agricultural land into residential, the city has to expand around orchards and vineyards. As a result, new housing developments and industrial parks pop up beyond agricultural areas, and the city map becomes a checkerboard of land use, with built-up areas interspersed with orchards and vineyards. In the spring, driving almost anywhere in town, it is impossible not to pass acres of trees laden with a variety of fruit blossoms.
We have friends who live near the top of a hill, with acres of grape vines spread out below them. They claim to have bought the property just because they like grapes. Most of the crop is taken off by a vintner, but they can gorge themselves on grapes all season. They trade some of the fruit with people on the next property, who grow peaches and cherries.
At the beginning of July, fruit is plentiful and readily available in stores and at nearby farms. Half a dozen varieties of cherries began showing up in mid-June, then apricots. Peaches come soon, then pears and plums, and finally apples. And I haven’t even considered the strawberries, raspberries, and blueberries. A fruit lover like me hardly knows where to start.
Gene - Your post re: idyllic Kelowna put me in mind of a recent e-mail exchange I had with my siblings re: the Brexit vote, and the role of romantic concepts re: urban vs. rural, as part of the 'narratives' we tell ourselves. I paste one of the posts below.
ReplyDelete" It's been a whirlwind past few days digesting the results of the Brexit vote, including a petition for a 'do over' which has already garnered 3.5 M signatures. It's been a media frenzy with, for instance, half of today's National Post debating the ramifications.
For me, it again demonstrates the power of the narratives we tell ourselves (or mythologies for the semioticians among you). Clearly, the 'Little England" re-imagined glory days of Empire and simpler times won. To a large extent, these aren't synonymous with the xenophobia the media zeroes in on, but rather a golden-hued caricatured past, and taps into the very human desire for homogeneity and predictability. My pub conversations during my two recent visits to Britain had convinced me that 'Leave' would win, albeit by a narrow margin.
Similarly, the vote shows the enduring insight of German sociological concepts of gemeinschaft vs. gesellschaft. Wikipedia, as usual, does a great job of explicating these - "According to the dichotomy, social ties can be categorized, on one hand, as belonging to personal social interactions, and the roles, values, and beliefs based on such interactions (Gemeinschaft, commonly translated as community), or on the other hand as belonging to indirect interactions, impersonal roles, formal values, and beliefs based on such interactions (Gesellschaft, commonly translated as society)". These concepts are often used in characterizing rural as idyllic and urban as degrading. Probably the quintessential demonstration of the dichotomy was in the 1982 American film Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance, scored by Phillip Glass, where all images of nature and rural landscapes are accompanied by soothing pastoral music, while urban scenes are hyper-kenetic, set to a chaotic, pumped up rhythm.
This simplistic dichotomy, which also infuses more romantic aspects of current environmentalism, was powerful during the referendum, with its quaint visions of tea cozies and village life, proving more compelling than the expansive, Obama-esque embrace of diversity and opportunity/uncertainty.
One of the best things about retirement is the ability to pursue pleasures which demand a leisurely pace, e.g. extended reading. This morning included dipping into one of my favourite peripatetic journalists, Ryszard Kapuscinski's Travels with Herodotus. (The title refers to the fact that these initial journalistic forays were accompanied with a gifted copy of The Histories, whose insights he finds comforting.) I always find his books, written during the 1950-80s, to be insightful - or, as the NY Times phrases it - "Kapuscinski is an enchanting guide, combining boundless stamina, felicitous writing, childlike curiousity, and the literate authority of a true intellectual".
Early in this book, struggling with his basic English in India, he reflects "Language struck me at that moment as something material, something with a physical dimension, a wall rising up in the middle of the road and preventing my going further, closing off the world, making it unattainable...." Later in the same chapter, he voices a sentiment which I've long felt "I understood that every distinct geographic universe has its own mystery and that one can decipher it only by learning the local language. Without it, this universe will remain impenetrable and unknowable, even if one were to spend entire years in it.... I [came to] understand that the more words I knew, the richer, fuller, and more variegated would be the world that opened before me, and which I could capture."
Hasta luego
Tom