Louche Leaves

It all started, for me, while babysitting my ten-year-old granddaughter.

The thin red jellies within you or within me, the bones and the marrow in the bones, / The exquisite realization of health; / O I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul. — I Sing the Body Electric, by Walt Whitman The Cut…

Chapter One: The Glove is Found Left Hand Glove Detail, Voytikof, via Wikimedia Commons.

Sometimes I write to exorcise unpleasant emotions, and this is one of those times.

I want to be mindful.

It is summer now and in a few odd spaces I can smell something that only exists in the margins.

Don't it always seem to go That you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone?

Today, July 15, 2026, Toronto woke up to the worst air on Earth.

The other evening I forgot a wet bathing suit outside.

A warning before we go anywhere: this essay meanders intentionally.

Although I profoundly disagree, let’s start with Protagoras, who said it first, and said it cleanly: Man is the measure of all things.

Some might think this is a little thing, but the truth is that it is not.

What connects cross-dressing sex workers, three embattled groups of nuns and monks, soldiers, a roller skating rink, feral cats, lucertole (lizards), a bridge of many names and the sea women of a river?

June 19, 2017.

We tend to think of genealogy as being the exclusive province of humanity, or even of some animals — such as dog or horse pedigrees — but we seldom extend the very real metaphor to objects.