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Acts of care

OCTOBER 7TH, 2025

The squirrels are very busy in my neighbourhood. Darting across the road in front of cars with acorns in their mouths, they’re everywhere - Fall’s harvest in service of Winter prep is fully underway. Last night was also the (full) Harvest moon, it looked like a giant coin floating over the water.

My baby isn’t much of a baby anymore and has begun attending school, where we’ve been blessed with his new teacher - unbeknownst to her, she has been appointed the role of my latest guru. I am learning as much as my kid is. I am seeing in new ways, being taught how to actually observe, with the goal of discovery rather than ascribing meaning (a challenge for me with my visual arts background). I have been awakened to the meaning of satisfaction - it is in self-fulfilment, continuous growth. Children get their dopamine-hits from understanding something for the first time or achieving new abilities. In the natural order of things, so should we, for the rest of our lives. The demands of our schedules and work and bills to pay and everything else have us stagnant and stunted, instead seeking temporary reward through consumption (shopping for stuff, swiping for content, watching tv, mood-altering substances, insatiable hunger, attention for external validation rather than connection, and so on.) The school year has just begun, but I feel the synapses firing, connecting the dots between how a child’s mind works and my own.

Speaking of self satisfaction, I finally finished a sweater I had been working on since March and have been wearing it constantly. I had unravelled a mohair cardigan I had made 4 years ago because I was not 100% satisfied with it, and now I am 100% satisfied with it. It took me 6 months of knitting and unravelling until I finally landed on what I wanted it to be, with the only constraint of needing it to use up 10X50g skeins of mohair exactly. It’s knit top-down so it is entirely seamless, which I feel this fine yarn deserved. I’ve found that I’m growing into a bit of a perfectionist, which is something I never was before, but am enjoying quite a lot. I realize now that in order to fulfill a vision, trial and error are simply part of the process and starting over (and over and over) is an opportunity to further master my craft rather than anything to be frustrated about. I think perfectionism has become a bit of a bad word, but when the item of imperfection is not conflated with the self, the practice of refinement is joyful rather than egoic. Anyway, this has been my own Fall harvest.

Upon completion, my kid said “where’s my sweater?” which I felt was a fair question, I hadn’t made him one in a while. He’s been noticing the softness and texture of my different knits; his sense of discernment is becoming more sophisticated, I’m so proud. I made one for him as well with some organic cotton and linen blend yarn I had previously hand dyed. He has a newfound desire for cashmere, but that will only become available to him once he stops wiping his mouth on his sleeve. This little cardigan only took a week on my retro hand operated knitting machine.

I haven’t written since early Summer, so it’s been a season and I’ve been keeping busy beyond knitting. I’ve done more live drawings.

This is one of my bestie Marie-Claire, she sat for me in July for about 3 hours. This session was longer than I normally do, but made for an excellent drawing, IMO.

This was an hour-long portrait I did of my father in law. My mother in law did not like it but I think I captured his depth and character quite well, it is one of my favourites so far.

I spent long afternoon and evening at Audrey’s place drawing a few live poses. The feet are my favourite of the three I did. For whatever reason, I do not feel like I fully captured her face in the portrait, yet I find the drawing to be very interesting nonetheless.

I also live-drew a wedding, of which I do not have a good photo but it was a more casual rendering and quicker style of drawing, I did a landscape of different scenes from the day in a singular composition, in pencil and watercolour.

Finally, just as September kicked in with all of its back-to-work and back-to-school vibes, I was inspired to make myself some business cards.

I glued together two sheets of my portrait-drawing papers, one in cream and one in white. Then I cut out business cards from the large sheet and individually typed them out on a typewriter. I made a small series of three different versions, quite happy with how they turned out. Left side is the front of the card, right side is the back.

So there’s a little recap of the work I’ve been up to, which in retrospect feels pretty productive for someone who had a kid at home all of August. We had an eventful summer, we went to the beach, I rented a bouncy castle and threw a party for all the kids we know, visited la Ronde and les Jardins Botaniques, we saw friends, we encountered death. One morning, we were on our family jog and found a dead black cat on the side of the road. It looked peaceful, like it had fallen asleep and never woke up. This produced many questions for a preschooler, which seemed like the universe preparing him for the upcoming death of our pet rabbit Bernard, who died a few days later, just a week shy of his 11th birthday.

A friend of mine had been writing about post-breakup grief on her Substack around this time, and shared many thoughts that had been percolating in myself simultaneously. Do you ever get this? It’s like we can catch an energetic wave in the collective (un?)conscious and we ride by each other on it. (Speaking of substacks, I didn’t realize when I deleted my account it also unsubscribed me from all the newsletters I followed, and now that I’ve re-followed them all my replies seem to go straight to spam. Just saying, check your spam.) To hers, I replied : “A pet, especially a rabbit, especially mine who was quite feral and non-affectionate, is so different from a human person yet losing anything that you give your time, attention and care to guts a little hole inside that feels like it needs to be filled again. There is something magical about the space created in a loss, even though it does, I think, need to be filled again. Not always with the same thing, maybe just integrating the insight gained from the full experience and its end.” I had a nightly care ritual for him that has now left literal space in my routine to fill, and after a few days of apathetically spending it watching youtube tarot pulls, I now go for an evening workout or read. All the books I’ve been reading this year are coincidentally about motherhood, and Bernard being my first animal adoptee, was like my first foray into caring for something dependent on me; my mothering training wheels. Not unlike my kid’s satisfaction in learning to ride a bike, or mine in attempting to knit the perfect sweater, caring for something outside of myself provides endless opportunity for growth and a-ha moments and connection and literally everything that makes us feel alive, I am integrating it all.

To wrap this up I’ll end with a witch-moment I had recently, given it’s October. After a few days in a row of the most banal type of house-chores, I reached a fever pitch of agitation. I had taken dinner out of the oven after working on it all afternoon, set the glass baking dish on the hot stove and by some temperature reaction or magic (frustration manifest?) the casserole exploded, sending shards of glass all over everything, including the meal. I cleaned the glass off the floor and left the rest, told my bf I was tapping out, “order something”, and I was going for a run. The next day, the dinner-explosion was followed by a difficult morning routine that had me texting my friend “WHAT IS THE POINT OF ALL THIS EFFORT?”. I think it was the eclipse or something. Immediately with a loud bang, a bird flew into the window, hard. I went outside, to find it stunned/dying on the porch. Knocked out of my own female angst, I watched it for a moment and went back inside. I checked on it ten minutes later, it was still there, looking to be in pretty rough shape. I didn’t want to make a bad situation worse by hovering over it, it probably wanted to die in solitude, I thought. I gathered a sprig of the last remaining plants in my garden, some lavender, rosemary and eucalyptus, tied it in a little bundle and put it next to the bird, and wished it a peaceful journey. I went back inside and watched it through the window, and after about a minute, it sprung back up and flew away. There is no point to acts of care, they are the point.

Lots Of Love,

Leah Legault

LETTRES