I know that reading poetry first thing in the morning renews me – helps me enter my own writing with fresh energy. Instead of poetry, however, I often drift into the crossword, whose answers I can’t solve without cheating. Or The Globe and Mail, which never makes me glad to be alive. Well, seldom. Sometimes an obituary will perk me up.

This week I read about the cowboy poet Harvey Mawson, dead at 81, whose earliest years were on his great-grandfather’s Saskatchewan ranch. His backyard was “mile upon mile of open prairie – the Brightwater Marsh with its rich bird and plant life, the exquisite sand hills, and the Round Prairie, where a group of Metis had settled in the 1850s.” As a boy his greatest pleasure “was to explore this land on horseback, learning its secrets.”

Ah, to be a cowboy.

On a recent walk to the river in the surging February light, we came upon a man and a dog, the golden retriever wide and happy, the man ready with a friendly hello. Coming behind them at some distance was a smaller dog making slow, steady, dainty progress. She was eighteen years old. Blind and deaf, but happy to be out on a clement day. Her fur was mostly grey and her body was like my mother’s back, curved and shrunken. Nevertheless, she managed to be stately in her dotage. The man said that the younger dog, only seven, had always looked to her to see how to react, and now that she was blind and deaf, he still looked to her.

The same day we brought my mother here for dinner. She paused before the arduous climb of our front steps, looked around, and said with her special alacrity, “The snow is puissant!”

It’s not the first time a French word has surfaced to startling effect in her addled conversation. In the Oxford dictionary there it is: ‘puissant’ meaning ‘mighty, powerful.’

“Chapeau!” I said, and raised my hat to her.

A week ago we were in Toronto to see our daughter and we went for a walk through the Distillery District, enchanted by the momentary sunshine and all the old brick and stone buildings converted into studios, workshops, arts offices. I bought a completely unnecessary dress, a black, cocktail affair, and heard my late friend Rhoda say into my ear: You are out of control.

I bought a hat.

We returned home by train and I went back to the second volume of Samuel Beckett’s letters. I love his gloomy company. His wryness, tenderness, openness. His combativeness and considerateness. His poetry.

Beckett. The weekly dose of “Downton Abbey.” Drinking wine by the fireplace with friends. The lengthening light. My husband’s ever-hopeful despair about the canal and the world. My brother’s admiration of my mother. My son’s independence. My daughter’s determination.

It’s a month that demands strength of character, January. Nevertheless, good riddance, as my father-in-law used to say of his ex-daughters-in-law.

What a hue and cry there would have been once upon a time. Last spring, reading the correspondence between Margaret Laurence and Al Purdy, I came upon Purdy’s fiery denunciation of the sale of Ryerson Press to the American company McGraw-Hill in 1970: he immediately withdrew the book he’d been planning to publish with them.

What different times those were, yet not so different. As Purdy wrote soon afterwards, “the Ryerson sale gone ahead and completed as expected, everyone talking a good fight but not much action otherwise.”

Remember when Trudeau said that if Canada were to end, he hoped it would go with a bang and not a whimper?

As part of the present wrenchingness, if that’s a word, is the parallel bleakery, if that’s a word, of seeing the Harper government attack ‘foreign money’ the odd time it suits them. It suits them when they want to undermine environmental groups raising questions about Enbridge’s proposed Northern Gateway oil pipeline from Edmonton to Kitimat.

All this takes me back, of course, to the proposed Mackenzie Valley gas pipeline of the 1970s. In those days the bogeyman was ‘southern white advisors’ polluting the minds of the native people. See Late Nights on Air.

For different times, when Canadian cultural activists weren’t so thin on the ground, see Margaret Laurence—Al Purdy: A Friendship in Letters.

What a lovely thing to be reading in the middle of the night, the Christmas tree dark beside me, Father Christmas on the coffee table.

Father Christmas I pore over every December, entranced by the book-wide panels of changing sky that St. Nick and his reindeer travel through on their annual round. Raymond Briggs has them pass through every weather and every hour: snow, rain, lightning, fog, first light, sunrise, morning. Did Paterson Ewen ever see this book? I think of his brilliant horizontal paintings on gouged plywood of atmospheric phenomena – rain, clouds, comets, sun, moon, storms.

It’s the progression from one thing to the next that enchants. The progression from a barren apricot tree finally bearing too much fruit to a 63-year-old woman deciding she will have to make jam but needs some help, to her selecting a young man to be the extra hand and thereby overturning her life. The progression of Father Christmas from his cozy arctic solitude out into the great world of skies and rooftops and chimneys that lead him into one home after another, until exhausted he makes the return trip to his own creaturely comforts of warm stove, hot bath, roast turkey, cognac, cocoa, bed, and beloved sleep.

One thing summons up another and you have a story. “And she longed to know what the apricots had meant, and continued to mean, even as she realized with dismay that her life was falling apart.” The falling apart is a late and embarrassing harvest that overwhelms her. What will she do with it?

Here’s one. Jean Renoir writing about his famous father. The impassioned serenity of the final period, ‘a question of being alert and not getting nervous’. He approached with less fear, having discovered that the hunter’s buckshot was love continually renewed.

Renoir, My Father rescued me one lonely winter’s night in 2010 when I was stranded in London, Ontario. I had given a reading in the afternoon, then been taken to a hotel, deposited there, and I had nothing to do until my train left the next morning. I knew a part of London, since my parents had lived there for many years, so I felt doubly alone or doubly strange. I decided to go for a walk and soon found myself on a typically long, cold, wind-blown street with nothing at all of interest until I came upon a used bookstore and fell into its arms. I poked about for an hour, reasonably happy, but finding nothing I wanted to buy, then instantly joyous when I saw Renoir, My Father on one of the shelves. I knew it; I had borrowed it from the library years ago and loved it and always wanted a copy of my own. For that night and the following day on the train, it made my life worth living.

I wasn’t even a great fan of Renoir’s paintings – they were too blurry, too marshmallowy for me. But I loved reading about his progress from boyhood to great old age, his discoveries and decided opinions in the notebook he kept. The two I remember best: An artist must eat sparingly and give up a normal way of life, and Delacroix never won a prize. The second is especially useful to remember.

A few weeks ago I happened to see one of Renoir’s last paintings and looked at it for a long time, disarmed, finally appreciating the loose, breathing brushwork that brought forth the full body of the young woman and her incredible skin.

As for the hunter’s buckshot being love continually renewed, I understand that better too, reminded of something my husband said to me many years ago. “If you could only enjoy the people you write about,” he said, “instead of forever criticizing them. No matter how flawed, if you would only enjoy them!” Love continually renewed is the weapon that brings your characters close, or brings you close to them. You have them in your sights and your sights aren’t narrow. It has nothing to do with letting them off easy. It’s something else entirely.

She looked so much better with her hair washed and combed and pinned with three bobby pins instead of the usual ten or twenty she jabs into place. I got her to stretch out on the chesterfield and rest her head on a pillow, and I read to her. Usually I read things she has written herself, her painting memories or her memories of her childhood lake near Renfrew, and she gives me credit for writing them no matter how often I say, “No, all of the credit goes to you, Professor Higgins.”

I know what I’ll read to her next. Killdeer, Phil Hall’s new collection of poems, which I’m reading now with such love and envy. She will respond to them as she responds to music. In these realms she is as discerning as ever. We took her on Saturday to the live broadcast from the Met of Philip Glass’s opera about Gandhi. At the end she reached for my hand and said in a choked voice, “That was beautiful. It was just wonderful.”

Though her mind misplaces so much – she even misplaces who I am at times – she remembered the opera two, three, four days later.

The poems in Killdeer will do the same. They’ll clear away all the debris in her mind.

In the London Review Bookstore, I found a book I’ve wanted to read ever since my literature-studying son raved about it a few months ago. Not The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes, the new Booker winner, but the original The Sense of an Ending published in 1966 by the critic Frank Kermode. Barnes borrowed the title and who can blame him. It’s a great title. Given the struggle I have with endings, I fell for it hard.

I bought poetry too, a couple of books by Louise Glück, whose work I admire deeply. In London I always reconnect with my fifteen-year-old self, the girl who moved with her family to England for a year and discovered one day in grammar school that she could write poems of a sort, and thereafter wanted to be a writer.

During that year in England, 1967, the world also opened up for my mother. She comes from the Ottawa Valley, not far from Arnprior, and grew up wanting to be a painter but never had the chance. In London that changed. She took art classes every day for the first time in her life. She was 48. These places, London and the Ottawa Valley, fold us together into one aspiring story. “I spent the year doing what I wanted to do,” my mother said to me yesterday. “That’s why it was so wonderful.”