Our newest issue has arrived! Pick up a copy, flip through our cover photo essay, or sign up for our weekly newsletter to never miss a story.
The garden has been suffering. The person I hired to “tidy things up” razed all the beds, ripping out everything before I had a chance to check on him. Apparently, he didn’t know what were weeds and what were not. Then, during a storm a few days later, a large branch sheared off the aging, slightly wild lilac tree in the front yard that the cat uses as a scratching post.
It’s hard contemplating leaving this house. I’ve lived here 16 years, longer than any other home I’ve had. The big clear-out has begun, and I’m surprising myself how unattached I am to the clutter accumulated during 34 years of a relationship now over. My visceral reaction to the scorched earth of the garden, though, reminds me that I’ve only just begun bagging things for donation or dumpster, and there will be many tears and torn emotions yet to navigate.
The last summer here has officially started, and I’m happy that my sons are both present, ready to help sort through the remnants of their childhood: the stuffies, games, cars, Playmobil, Lego, books… We tried to have a yard sale years ago and gave up as the boys just snuck everything back inside, incapable of letting it go. This time, they appear sanguine; they are stepping into their adult lives.
When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
The things, of course, don’t really matter. The memories, the joy, the love held in our hearts are what counts. Wherever we are will be home. It’s the people that make the place.
Restaurateur Tannis Ling creates spaces that make people happy. In the year her Chinatown stalwart Bao Bei celebrates its 15th anniversary, and Kissa Tanto retained its Michelin star, Ling has opened a cocktail bar: Meo. In this issue, we look at her approach to hospitality and how she brings her aesthetic—at once very modern and yet infused with nostalgia—into a coherent living organism.
Zébulon Perron is a master of designing third spaces—the rooms in which we neither live nor work, but those where our social selves develop and run free. His ability to bring people together through design is evident across his home city of Montreal and beyond. He talks to us about what drives his passion for people, and the personal projects that drill into his own memories of family and childhood.
Seismically upgrading the Arthur Erickson masterwork that is the Museum of Anthropology has been a massive and complex undertaking. Collaboration has been key in efforts to protect the architectural integrity of the building while also addressing how the museum spaces are rethought with respect to the Indigenous nations whose art and culture is on display. Here, as in so much of life, there are layers upon layers to consider.
This liminality—the space we straddle between past and present, real and imaginary, action and emotion—suffuses this issue. It is epitomized, perhaps, by our cover story: tasked with recording the Tofino surf community of which he is a passionate member, photographer Kamil Bialous dove much deeper, conjuring an impressionistic portrait of what it feels like to be at one with the water, the board, one’s self. The result is magical.
Looking at these shimmering, abstract images, I am reminded that whatever the past was and the future will be, all that matters is how we experience where we are right now.
Perhaps I will plant tomatoes this year, after all.
Read more from our Summer 2024 issue.
