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Crinkled brows, eyes shifting from side to side, estimating, evaluating; finally a bark of laughter erupts and a lead card is thrown onto the table.

“We have you now,” shrieks a female voice.

“Maybe,” replies a male opponent as a second card meets the first.

A third card, higher ranked, joins the small pile, and a fourth. The trick is taken by the opponent.

“Always expect a holdout,” the man’s voice advises.

Roars of laughter fill the kitchen with raucous sound. Another Saturday night has convened at the kitchen table for the weekly Euchre game between Mom and Dad and Mom’s sister and brother-in-law.

The aroma of strong coffee and one of Mom’s baked wonders tantalizes nostrils and stomachs of those present. It’s always the same group; couple vs. couple or men vs. women. The game might change from Euchre to rummy or to Pitch, but the night would leave everyone relaxed and satisfied.

Mom’s sister had a great deal to do with that feeling of hilarity. She loved playing the fool during card nights and did it very well. Some nights she was more boisterous than on others, but she seldom turned serious when games were in play.

My younger brother and his counterpart cousin generally watched TV during card night and then settled down to sleep. My older cousin and I watched the game in the kitchen as interested by-standers. We didn’t play. If Euchre was being played, we definitely were not allowed to play. In our part of the country, that game was a gambling game, even when not played for stakes. No children need apply.

None would ever consider the two women as not being family. My mom resembled my aunt in coloring and hair style. Their builds were nearly identical. Both were natural artists and could turn almost anything into a piece of art.

My mother worked in paint and clay or metal and findings from the forest. Her sister worked in paint and fabric, for the most part. Both loved antiques, but my aunt could have been a dealer. The knowledge she had was gleaned from years of scouring antique shops, auctions, and estate sales.

Most of all, both women loved the outdoors and nature. They’d grown up in the country. Their mother had taught them a deep love and respect for what grew wild or by design. They each enjoyed growing food for their tables as much as gathering from the wild.

With all of these commonalities, they managed to remain individuals who stood apart from each other.

Auntie was more playful than Mom. Mom had better rapport with children and animals. Auntie desired a house full of antiques and a spotless home. Mom liked things tidy, but she preferred a sense of home and comfort to fill rooms meant for living.

Aunt and Uncle often took Grandma and my cousins on trips away for a weekend to see other relatives. Mom didn’t bother. Her sister took great pleasure in that part of mother-daughter time; leaving Mom to do the Sunday home visits for family time.

Sisters, friends, companions, champions, confidantes; each filled those roles for the other. They talked in person or on the phone every day, without fail. Close didn’t begin to d

"Mirror" by Jeannie Baker

In her new book, “Mirror”, Jeannie celebrates the  differences that makes up the diversity of world cultures and the elements that unite us, the bonds of family and the mundanities of every day life.

Even the presentation, as two books united within one cover, highlights  ’same and different’, but highlights it in a way that draws us closer to both families, the traditional Moroccan family and the modern Australian family.

Turning pages of each book simultaneously, reveals parallel aspects of the daily lives of these very different families.  We see them with the intimacy and immediacy of a fly on the wall. They are at work,  at meals, settling for the night, shopping and sharing. The colours are luminous and the details absorptive. Words are superfluous!

I have always been a fan of Jeannie Baker’s beautiful, evocative, detailed collages. This latest book is a treasure!

“Mirror” by Jeannie Baker, Walker Books, ISBN 978-1-4063-0914-0.

Ammon Shea recently spent a year of his life reading the OED from start to finish. Over the next few months he will be posting weekly blogs about the insights, gems, and thoughts on language that came from this experience. His book, Reading the OED, has been published by Perigee, so go check it out in your local bookstore. In the post below Ammon reflects on his trip to Oxford.

I always find it bemusing to travel to a new place, and the things I find most striking are not the overt and major differences between where I’m traveling and where I’m from. I tend to focus on the things that remind me of home, but which are slightly different – and somehow the similarities make it all feel even more foreign, as though I’ve stepped into an altered version of where I’m from.

Oxford is a city full of bicycles and old bars. We have cyclists and bars in New York City, but not in the same way. When exiting the train station in Oxford the first thing I noticed was not the splendid old buildings, or the difference in light, or the cars driving on the other side of the road; the first thing I noticed was the sea of hundreds and hundreds of bicycles parked in a lot next to the street. The only time I’ve ever seen such a profusion of bicycles here was last year, when I saw some news footage of a man in a nearby town who had been stealing bicycles for years, and had managed to accumulate a similar number.

The cyclists in Oxford seem to have much of the casual disregard for safety as do those of my hometown, weaving in and about the cars and pedestrians. But they also signal when they are planning on turning, giving a curious chopping motion of the arm. This never happens in New York, and it took me a day or two before I realized that this arm chop presaged a turn, and was not a widespread neurological disorder that afflicted English velocipedists.

And while there is no shortage of bars in New York, I found it almost unnerving to walk into a drinking establishment that was established several hundred years before the government of the country that I come from. The students lounging about on a Saturday evening looked not so different from those of New York, but the fact that the wall that they were boozily leaning against had held up inebriated youth for five hundred years made it feel markedly askew.

It’s the differences within the similarities that make Oxford feel like such a foreign place to me. Although I should confess that there were occasions this foreign-ness was also made obvious by something which bore absolutely no similarity to what I am used to in America. Such as when I picked up the paper one morning and saw that William Hague had attacked Gordon Brown for what he termed his “hubristic and irresponsible claims”. I am trying to remember the last time I heard a national politician here use a word such as “hubristic” without fear of being tarred with the elitist brush, and I cannot think of when that might be. This is a depressing thought, and I suppose that is why I spend my travels looking at bicycles and bars.

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