Janet Pollock Millar

Kate Braid, THE EROTICS OF CUTTING GRASS: REFLECTIONS ON A WELL-LOVED LIFE

Qualicum Beach, B.C.: Caitlin Press, 2025. $24.00

Multi-genre writer and teacher Kate Braid is known for her poetry and essays, and for two memoirs about her experience as a Red Seal Carpenter in the 1970s and 1980s. Braid’s most recent book is a collection of personal essays that combines memoir with reflections on topics including aging, gender roles, embodiment, colonialism, and human connection. Readers will appreciate Braid’s insight, storytelling, and humour as she looks back over her “[w]ell-[l]oved [l]ife.”
Among the themes Braid explores throughout the book are the opportunities and limits inherent in aging. In “Me and Pablo Casals,” she describes falling in love with cello music and learning to play the instrument, inspired to overcome her fear when she hears of a friend’s double mastectomy. She dives into learning, with passion and self-deprecating humour: “‘Hot Cross Buns’ was my only tune. It didn’t matter that most people would have thought it a child’s ditty; ‘Hot Cross Buns’ was my anthem.” However, her time with the cello is cut short by sudden hearing loss in one ear. And, thus, “The Ear That Went Away” recounts her struggle to come to terms with partial deafness, including a vivid description of her panic during a hearing test, her appeals to alternative medicine, and the isolation she experiences as someone who can no longer hear well. The essay reminds readers that the able-bodied are only temporarily so, linking thematically with other essays in the collection that explore human vulnerability.
Embodiment is also a source of power and connection. Braid brings her sense of humour to bear in the titular essay, the story of her “[s]ecret [l]ove [a]ffair with a Husqvarna.” She finds joy in riding this lawnmower over her property, getting to know the land in the process, with its hills and dips: “[o]n the Husky, I felt the earth with my entire body.” Our embodiment connects us with the body of the earth. In earlier work and elsewhere in this collection, Braid also talks about how she enjoyed the physicality of the trades. I appreciate this perspective, as females are still not often socialized to enjoy their own bodies but to present them for others. As Braid’s writing so often makes clear, our connection to our bodies and to the body of the earth grounds us in our own power.
Braid expands on the theme of connection in the essays that explore cross-cultural experience with a genuine openness to other ways of doing and being. Writing of her time in France with humour and humility, she pokes gentle fun of herself in “Le Lunch,” a story about visiting a restaurant with her son and his family and “feeling a bit like a Canadian barbarian invading the temple of good taste.” Braid’s powers of description are evident here, as she comments on the minuscule delicacy of the meal’s components: “the tiny specs, mere memories of broccoli.”
“Je Suis Charlie?” takes a more serious turn. Braid considers our connection and responsibility to others by reflecting on the 2015 Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, which occurred while she and her husband were staying in the city. She describes the government-mandated minutes of silence as:

reassuring in a way that surprises me. I’d thought I
was tough. I’d thought I was strong. This isn’t even
my battle—or is it? But the fact is that right now I’m
scared, and in this moment, in a “foreign” country
with all these others around me paying their respects
too, I feel safer.

The essay also thoughtfully examines the intersection of freedom of speech and cultural sensitivity, including differences in approach between North America and France. Braid asks,

[i]n this time of increasingly crude and violent responses
at every level, how do we convene a respectful
public debate on the questions crucial to each of us?
How do we learn to listen, even when the conversations
are difficult?
And what other option do we have?

Braid’s rhetorical questions point to the urgency of respecting individual differences while being able to work together to solve our significant common crises.
The collection concludes with “Over Our Heads,” a short piece about paying attention, sitting still, and living in the moment. The essay seems a fitting reconnection to the subtitle: Reflections on a Life Well-Loved. Braid’s writing here evinces depth of thought, humility, and skilled storytelling. Wherever her pen takes her, I’m glad to go along for the ride.