Love Songs: Small Tender Essays

By Judy Pollard Smith

The reader will enjoy several finely crafted personal essays interspersed with amusing vignettes. The essays provide a spirited and sensitive look at nature, music, literature, family, friends, heritage, multiculturalism and personal loss. Some of the essays have been previously published in newspapers or magazines. They are short, salient and to the point.
This small tender book offers a unique glimpse at grief recovery. What do the bereaved do with the long corridor of empty hours? How do they go about recreating life? Where does the balance sit between continuing in sorrow or telling oneself that putting one foot in front of the other is essential?
How do we hold onto the history of our loved ones? What life rafts have we in order when we need them? Who and what will we put in the drivers seat?
In spite of the the loss factor the authour’s lyrical writing style brings smiles and hope. It is forward looking and honest.
It is a calming read for lovers of life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Aug 10, 2022
• ISBN: 9781665726801

Judy Pollard Smith

In her house are boxes of thirty-five year’s worth of journals that she began to keep when their youngest child was five. “Had my forbearers kept journals that I could look at years later I would have loved them for it. I hope our children will love me for it too when they are trying to find room for them someday.” Her essays, book reviews, short stories, and travel articles have appeared in The Globe and Mail, The National Post, The Hamilton Spectator, Room magazine, and women’s magazines in England. Her name is engraved on The Lady Violet Astor Rosebowl, which lives in the library in Chawton House, Jane Austen’s home. It was awarded to her for a Globe and Mail essay by The Society of Women Writers and Journalists in England. She has written two previous books, one about Lady Alice Seeley Harris (1870-1970), whose photography of abuses in the rubber trade helped to remove King Leopold’s grasp on Congo. Her other book was the journal she started on her seventieth birthday and kept every day for one year. It was her experiment in making every moment count: The More The Merrier ~ Celebrating Seventy from Archway Publishing. She thanks her family for being wonderful, her friends because they are too, as are the good people from all over the world who have woven the richest of tapestries into the lives of her family. Threads of gold indeed. One of her favourite sign-offs is that which Emily Carr wrote at the end of her letters to her great friend Ira Dilworth, “Oodles of love,” which Emily eventually shortened to “Oodles.” To all of you, she sends “oodles.”

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Copyright © 2022 Judy Pollard Smith.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

Archway Publishing

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Scripture taken from the King James Version of the Bible.

ISBN: 978-1-6657-2679-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-2680-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022912506

Archway Publishing rev. date: 08/08/2022

Contents

1. Acknowledgements

2. Prologue

3. Small stories

4. Upside Down

5. Vignette in St. George’s Anglican Church Garden

6. Date Nights

7. Vignette on a Tuesday

8. The Greats

9. Vignette on a Sunday

10. Up and Over

11. Vignette on a Wednesday Evening

12. Janine’s Summer House

13. Vignette on a Summer’s Afternoon

14. Chosisme

15. Vignette on an Afternoon in Early Spring

16. Dear Dennis and Liz…

17. Vignette on a Thursday

18. Cookie by Cookie

19. Vignette with Scissors

20. Letting it Go

21. Vignette on a Friday

22. Who Said Anything About Being Too Old?

23. Vignette on a Breezy Sunday Afternoon

24. On Becoming Irish

25. Vignette on a Rainy Saturday Morning

26. Libraries

27. Vignette on What Have They Done?

28. Porches

29. Vignette on Saturday from The New York Times Online

30. Taste and See

31. Vignette on a Monday

32. Broken Piano, Heavy Cello

33. Vignette on a Thursday

34. Shepherd’s Pie

35. Vignette on Wednesday

36. Christmas of 2014 Was Just Ducky

37. Vignette on a Quiet Friday

38. The Trails We Leave

39. Vignette on a Cold, Windy Sunday

40. Birds

41. Vignette on a Friday

42. Collecting

43. Vignette Nearing the End of This Book

44. One Thousand and Fifty Days

45. About the Authour

46. Bibliography

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Acknowledgements

W ORDS THAT MAKE UP stories and essays don’t fall out of the sky. Small ideas are given to us as we go through life. It isn’t happenstance. Many of my own essays come from thinking about interactions with other people. Some of them started from small seeds dropped into the ground by those who were in my life long ago, others more recently. I think of those people as the Johnny Appleseeds of story planting.

I am fortunate (more than!) to have a coterie of people in my life whom I love. They’ll understand if I don’t thank them one by one. Wouldn’t it be awful to wake up after the book is published and realize I’d left someone out? Horrors!

The fact that you are out there, all of you, makes me one fortunate woman indeed.

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Prologue

G RIEF IS AN ELEMENTAL, universal experience. We can’t get through life without it. It makes us fully human.

Our losses demand that we pay grief its due.

And then, after a while, it asks of us to devise a small plan on how to engage with life once again. Those who grieve a death are not the only ones who hurt. There are many in this world who need a hand up, something to eat, refuge, a friend.

That’s where altruism comes in. I had thought of myself as altruistic until I realized that it alludes to good deeds that are done with no ulterior motive. I am highly motivated to suck the marrow out of life and to be well, so any action that I might do to help a fellow traveller works for me too, gives me a jolt of joy. I can see no wrong in that.

Perhaps that is how humans have been designed, so that those in need of food can be fed by those who need to feed in order to feel good themselves. A win-win. An eventual panacea for grief can be this very thing.

I have written a variety of short essays, a few about grief which are intended to be honest but not overwhelmingly sad. The bereaved do not need to be reading about sorrow. They know it well. It’s the curative that they seek.

I’ve included a variety of other essays too, some of which have been previously published in newspapers with permission to reprint them. Others are extracted from a pile as high as the Eiffel Tower in my cabinet, where I relegate essays that have not yet found a home. Some are funny, some perhaps thought provoking.

Maybe my love of music will come through as you read. Music changes me, helps me to get the jiggles out and let the light in, helps me to see the way things are meant to be. All kinds of music does this to me: secular music, spiritual music, classical music, the crooners. Both violins and rock bands fit into my world.

This is a small book, a book that you can pick up at any time. It’s not meant to demand anything from you, but I hope it brings you peace.

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Small stories

~ These words have I written for John ~

"You’re the cream in my coffee

You’re the salt in my stew

You will always be my necessity

I’d be lost without you."¹

L YRICS LIKE THOSE ABOVE don’t come along often. Having someone as the cream in your coffee gets the point across.

If you’ve never heard that jaunty tune, look up the lyrics, or better yet, listen. Nat King Cole does a silky job of it.

That was my theme song for our forty-two years of marriage.

I used to sing it to him. I am not a good singer.

But he put up with it.

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Upside Down

T HINGS ARE UPSIDE DOWN, inside out.

Everyone thinks he or she is a doctor. Outside the bank, customers line up along the sidewalk while the teller goes up and down asking, Are you feeling well? Fever? Symptoms? Been quarantined recently?

During the break between waves of the COVID virus, I went for a haircut. The stylist came out onto the pavement, quizzed me about my health (as if she was both an epidemiologist and a bank teller), and took my temperature. In the normal course of events, the stylist would talk to me on the phone and the doctor would click the thermometer on my forehead. When I called her last week with a small medical question about an unrelated issue, she would only talk to me on the phone.

It’s always Thursday when I think it’s Wednesday, and then I wonder what happened to Tuesday. That is what comes of having nothing penned in on those big white squares on the calendar that I keep on my refrigerator door.

Family dinners have ceased to exist. At Christmas Round One, I cooked and the kids dropped by the porch for take-out, when what we all needed was more of the eat-in-together variety.

We created some fun on Christmas morning, drinking hot chocolate in the snow. Duvets were pressed into duty on the summer lawn chairs to ward off the chill. By Christmas Round Two, doing the same things felt a bit passé.

Lockdowns provided the opportunity to see how I could value each day’s events without there being