I hear a thundering, heavy sound, I look out the window … and another rain storm has begun. I am in the week between closing one play and beginning rehearsals for another and have the desire to curl up in a chair in my pajamas, learn my lines and stay out of the rain, which has been pounding down for the past week. And in the middle of it all was Hallowe’en.  I usually love Hallowe’en .  

I didn’t blog last week, as I have been steeped in rehearsals for a very special play:  My Mother’s Story.  We are a cast of eight women, telling the stories of ordinary women’s lives – except that they are all extraordinary. The call went out last year, to women on Vancouver’s North Shore, to write the story of their mothers’ lives, in 2000 words.  From all who sent in stories, eight were selected to be woven together into a play.  So we, the actors, each play the writer and her Mum.  The stories range geographically far and wide, and cover many ethnicities. 

This week, I am fortunate to be in rehearsal with some incredible women, working on a new play:  My Mother’s Story. The director we are working with is asking us to use senses and muscles I haven’t used in years. I come home from rehearsal every day very tired … in a good way.  We are working very physically, almost dancing in some parts and since most of us are NOT dancers … there is a lot of laughter.

I am going out to dinner tonight. I am excited. I am sure the food will be well-prepared, and it will probably be visually appealing, but I won’t know that. The newly opened restaurant where Younger Son, the Vocal Eye audio description team (we do live audio description of theatre performances), and I will be dining is called Dark Table, and we will be eating in the dark, as a blind person would. 

This weekend, I am heading off to a celebration of long-lasting love and commitment.  Two dear friends are celebrating their recent marriage after having been together for many years, and this to me makes it all the sweeter.  They are dear, caring, private people who have raised a beautiful child, and worked together through many health issues, and it is an honour to be part of their special day of celebration.

Is there a better combination? There is a bakery in this city that makes a delicious, small, buttery, flaky chocolate croissant that is to die for.  They also don’t make very many of them, wisely not wanting to be stuck with day-old croissants, and increasing their appeal by their very limited daily quantity.  I make a pilgrimage into that bakery whenever I am down on Granville Island:  the reason is often an audition, and I have on occasion walked into said audition with delicate crumbs and morsels of melted chocolate clinging to my mouth.

LADY MACBETH Yet here’s a spot. DOCTOR Hark! she speaks. I will set down what comes from her, to satisfy my remembrance the more strongly. LADY MACBETH Out, damned spot! out, I say! Any chance I have to work a performance by my favorite actress, Judi Dench, into this blog, I will seize.  The clip is worth watching, if for nothing other than the eerie scream at the end.

It seemed to happen overnight.  From hot, stultifying, nothing moving, enervating afternoons of direct sunlight, to a damp smell of wet earth, and the smallest hint of chill in the air. Fresher breezes, cooler evenings, and is it true?  Can it possibly be?  It seemed only yesterday the kids were getting out of school, and I look up in the blue sky … and one leaf dislodges from our apple tree and makes its death spiral to land on my foot.

Since my venture two weeks ago into the wonderful world of nougat, I have been craving nuts with my chocolate. The squirrels in the hazelnut trees in our back yard have begun their insane, amusing, upside down  scramble to get them all before the next squirrel does and before that happens again this year, I am determined to harvest some myself. Suffice to say, I succeeded, got my fair share, and am feeling smarter than your average squirrel.

When I was a kid, I used to absolutely love a strange, weirdly white sticky confection filled with gooey blobs of … I am not sure what – I think, perhaps ju-jube, but they were brightly coloured, in bar form and called, imperiously Roman Nougat. It was and still is made by the Ganong Candy Company of St. Stephen, New Brunswick, a family owned company, now into its fourth generation of proprietors. 

I am having one of those sense memory experiences. They seem to happen for me a great deal in summer.  It must be the warm air tickling my skin and nose hairs, and rustling up odors and sounds that hearken back to “Dayes of Olde”, as I have taken to calling my life before kids. They range from the sound of a float plane crossing a still, blue sky the rustling of deciduous leaves in the afternoon heat the musky odor of forest dirt, stirred up by a sneaker on a path the blast of cruise ship whistles in the harbor (we have a lot of ‘em here in the summer)