Top five things about spending the hols in Vancouver

1) Walking around the woods in the Endowment Lands/Pacific Spirit Regional Park/unceded Musqueam territory. It is all columns of grey deciduous tree trunks and monolithic red, ropey tree trunks of darkling cedars; it is full of liquorice ferns, oyster mushrooms, fallen but still bright yellow and green alder leaves, the occasional holly, and billions of clumps of sword ferns cropping up waist high out of a shifting, dead, rustling carpet of rust-coloured maple leaves that rolls continuously throughout the forest floor.

2) Pine mushrooms/Ponderosa mushrooms/matsutake with udon. The mushrooms are available at Whole Foods, but we have really got to learn to hunt them for ourselves. I’d never realized, before we began to make this recipe, how intensely good pine mushrooms are. We’ve made this food twice in the last two weeks and are on the verge of buying out the store’s stock.

Chop pine mushrooms into two handfuls of 1″x1″ pieces

Heat butter in a wok or large frying pan till brown

Inhale the cinnamon aroma of the pine mushrooms and then throw them into the pan

Deglaze with good saké, not too sweet

Throw fresh udon into the sauce created by the mushrooms, butter, and sake

Squeeze wedges of lemon over everything; eat slowly

3) The MOA, Museum of Anthropology. There is, among other things, a South Seas collection made by the former owner of the house I live in now. He was the son of a whaler; he became something of an entrepreneur, moved around Canada, settled in Vancouver, and then sailed all around the South Pacific in a schooner–collecting shrunken heads, wooden swords, beads, shells, carven figures, shields, and so on. He had these on display all through the house. He somehow also accumulated a collection of things belonging to Inuit in the Coppermine River region.

4) The house I’m living in is 99 years old. I’m in the attic, which is good for the light and for seeing the mountains and the cedar trees, the skyscrapers and the ski hills lit up at dusk. It’s been renovated nicely, which is helpful for avoiding the bedbugs that seem to inhabit even the library books in this city. It is at the top of three landings and three flights of stairs.

One begins by climbing slippery, frost-coated exterior stairs of unpainted wood to the second floor entrance. The second floor itself is at the top of a second set of interior stairs that are carpeted, dusty, steep, and dark. Then one has to walk through the second floor, which is a weird communal boarding room arrangement between hippies who work for MEC. Mostly this just means photos of Bob Marley in clouds of sorcerous-looking pot smoke and sentimental quotations on little banners on the wall. Sadly, it also means incense; I’m working on putting seals on my door, because I’m a grinch. The common area belonging to the second floor is full of shelves of ski boots and camping gear, and it’s always very dark, with heavy, dark wooden trim on all the windows and doors and wainscotting. The area is lit only by a large, dingy wall of stained glass on one side and a paper lantern painted with Zen characters on the other.

There is a tiny rainbow sticker on the door to my apartment (which is at the top of the steepest stairs of all), because for the thirty years before I moved in, it was inhabited by Brenda and Lucy, who used to live in separate apartments in the house, and fell in love, and one of them moved up into the attic with the other one.

5) Frost. The combination of mountain and sea air in Vancouver is quite unusual. It’s very fresh, and produces heavy, sharp, shining hoarfrost on all the leaves and the pavement and even the sand along the ocean. And on the stairs.

Also 6) There is a baby grey squirrel that lives in a pile of yard trimmings on one edge of the forest. It watches us pass by and we watch how it roams its little home–every branch in the heap and every little cavern of leaves–with intimate familiarity.