Spring is setting in. Sugaring off started a week ago in the south of the province. The light is beautiful and the snow that could still happen is no longer scary. We allow ourselves to open a window from time to time to breathe the outside and this magnificent smell of ozone that perfumes the sheets drying on the line.
The expression “to break sugar on someone’s back” means something like this: to speak ill of someone behind their back. It comes from a past where the supply of sugar was piled up and crystallized; to get it, therefore, you had to break pieces of it. And doubled by this other expression: to sweeten someone, to make fun of someone.
It gets light earlier and later. Here and there, bits of soil emerge from the white floor of winter. The meltwater runs off and causes the ditches to overflow. The crows have left their winter haunt and come screeching – far too early and too close to my bed – at first light. A first raccoon, awakened from its sleep, died on the highway. Several splinters on the hands because of the wood and the work of earth to redirect the water which seeks and always finds its way. I unblock ditches and dig trenches with picks and shovels, breaking up the jelly.
Time to catch my breath, between the efforts, thoughts emerge: an aggressive and insolent China in the news. Still funny that we are surprised at the interference in our elections when it has been everywhere for decades and we boast of doing business with it. It looks like a revival of a bad movie where the good guys and the bad guys fight for eternity, but here it’s not fiction anymore.
And this story of incompetence (there are no other words) with the SAAQ, which tries to resemble Montreal mobility with its long lines… that is to say deficient (personally, I think it It’s a conspiracy and a cyberattack of the “anti-tank” militants, hey… hey…). Or this strange atmosphere last week, following a speech by the UN Secretary General on the decline of women’s rights in the world. He said that in three centuries it might be better (maybe).
As if the right to vote and the right to abortion or the idea of a sort of illusion of parity here and there and a few years of hashtag had sounded the death knell for a certain evolution. We advance, we retreat. We go back a lot, let’s say. Like a pendulum. There are plenty of opportunities to break the sugar on the back of the human race and its prehistoric nature. And the latter is frankly discouraging.
There are hundreds, if not thousands of things around each of us that come from China and are made there, like TikTok. And also women who are fighters and happy to finally exist a little better; to claim, to create, to say, to shout… Then like an ice jam that gives way, all of a sudden the desired state seems eternally doomed to failure. A few advances like a drop in the ocean. This observation by Mr. Gutteres sawed me.
And even. In an era of willful and wonderful communication, a multinational social media company plans to cut ties to news and some media. And we continue to adhere to this contract, stupid and happy. Is there a cosmic balance that escapes me? Do we suffer from a deficit of reality? I know that there is a huge divide between everyday life and the ideals that we want. How do you nurture and maintain the fantasy that everything will be better? Beautiful dreams come into us through our cracks, like water that always finds its way regardless of the consequences, but do we dream badly of the future? Poorly drained land is cheap.
I manage, with arms and backhoes, to draw ditches. There are certain discouraging and muddy hours; it is on oneself that one must take over and be responsible for a kind of future. Or dream a little more accurately and deflect disappointment.
Still, it flows in the maple grove, I’m talking about the trees here. It’s making syrup. Sometimes certain natural rhythms compensate for eighth notes. There are a thousand reasons to be discouraged and as many to continue. Failing to break sugar, I will make some, to drown my eggs in the syrup, gain strength and continue to draw.