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At ease with growing older

The Erotics of Cutting Grass: Reflections on a Well-Loved Life
by Kate Braid

Qualicum Beach: Caitlin Press, 2025
$24 / 9781773861623

Reviewed by Mary Ann Moore

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Kate Braid’s new book of essays gives much comfort: growing older has so much to offer if one remains curious. While there may be physical challenges along the way, aging doesn’t have to put an end to sensuality nor an enthusiastic embrace of all the senses.

In the “Wising Up” section of her book, Braid, who lives on Pender Island and in Victoria, shares the names of the women whose independence inspired her. In the essay, entitled “Wonder Woman a.k.a. Emily Carr,” Braid is full of enthusiasm for Rima from Green Mansions, Wonder Woman, Emily Carr for “the tenacity of her vision,” and Georgia O’Keeffe. Carr and O’Keeffe were courageous, leading unique lives off the beaten path; Braid has done that too.

In the 1970s and ‘80s, Braid was a construction labourer, apprentice, and journey carpenter. She began teaching construction at the BC Institute of Technology before enrolling in the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of British Columbia and becoming a teacher of creative writing. As she says of herself, she followed her own “wild” path.

Kate Braid has written much poetry and creative non-fiction. Her memoir The Erotics of Cutting Grass is her latest work. She lives on Pender Island and in Victoria. Photo Eve Pollard

While Braid never wanted kids, she fell in love with John who had a son of seven called Kevin. Braid became his “other mother” and later when Kevin married and had a child, she became a grandmother to a girl called Zlata. When Zlata was about ten, she drew up a family tree and included Braid as one of her three grandmothers. I’m sure other stepparents can relate to that honour.

When she was “fifty-three and outrageous,” Braid decided to take cello lessons. “In “Me and Pablo Cassals,” she writes of Rostropovich, Yo-Yo Ma, Casals, and discovering Jacqueline du Pré. What continued to draw her back to her cello practice was feeling as if she was meeting a lover each time as the cello resonated in her chest. “My whole body played cello.”

Braid writes about losing the hearing in one ear in one of her essays but she didn’t lose her whole-body response to the things that delight her.

When Braid and her husband John bought acreage on Pender Island (st̕ey̕əs) where they’d first met, their purchase included a Husqvarna grass cutter. On the “Husky,” she says “I felt the earth with my entire body.” She looked forward to cutting grass and was reminded of her years in construction as she had loved the physicality of it and the smell of fresh-cut lumber.  With the Husky: the smell of gas and fresh-cut grass.

Like learning a lover’s body, Braid came to know the land. She says that she promptly erased that line when first writing it but put it back in “because, yes, it’s been that kind of intimacy, that kind of love, a physical kind of love.” She has come to know their small piece of this beautiful earth intimately,” she writes in the title essay: “The Erotics of Cutting Grass.”

Braid didn’t shy away from traditionally male work. In Hammer & Nail (Caitlin Press, 2020) she recalls her time as a construction worker

Braid had the opportunity to visit France regularly to visit her son and his family in Strasbourg. In “A Colonial in France,” she describes the many forms of French bread as an “art, a grace, a manna.” The French don’t eat their bread with butter but Braid had a craving and requested it in a restaurant. She explained she was Canadian: “Ignorant colonialism was my last-ditch defence.” She did get some unsalted butter which apparently was delicious. I’ll bet!

On one occasion in France, January 7, 2015, Braid and John were strolling Avenue des Champs-Élysées in Paris when police vans and sirens put tourists and residents alike on high alert. Twelve people, including ten cartoonists, had been killed in the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical comic magazine, a locale close to their hotel.

Braid learns to not take her public safety for granted. “Where do you draw the line, and how do you mark it?” she wonders about Charlie Hebdo’s “lack of moderation.” She joins her family in Strasbourg to walk in solidarity with forty-five thousand others.

In the 1970s, Braid signed up for a course on Buddhism as she was curious and “groping for [her] own spiritual practice, mostly through a reverence for nature.” The practice of meditation has profoundly changed her life and has given her a tool, “a metaphorical hammer at last, with which to find delight in the moment.”

Kate Braid has written several books of poetry, non-fiction, and memoir. One of the latter was Journeywoman: Swinging a Hammer in a Man’s World which, from first draft to final publication, took her twenty-five years. She describes the experience in “Saying Hello to Fear.”

Braid’s earlier memoir was 2012’s Journeywoman: Swinging a Hammer in a Man’s World

Keith Maillard had been her teacher in a UBC creative writing class and she remembered him suggesting she sit her character in a chair with “you in the other.” In her regular seat at the Vancouver Public Library, she used the same Gestalt and put her “Block, whatever was stopping me from writing, into the chair opposite.”

She wrote down her conversation with her Block which was Fear; Fear became a companion rather than a foe. The manuscript was submitted for publication two years later and while the official launch was terrifying as she feared being sued or losing friends, comments in the weeks that followed were reassuring. She was grateful to hear from a woman who had done trades and blue-collar work all her life and said: “At last. Someone has told our story.”

And perhaps best of all, an email from her mother that said: “It is a story of courage, fortitude and forgiveness.”

In “Growing Golder,” also the title of the final section of the book, Braid reflects on the advantages of growing older. She no longer cares what anyone thinks of her. “I have enough trust in myself, in my own judgment, that – within the limits of the law – I’ll do what I want, the way I want to do it, looking the way I wish.” Caring what other people thought of her looks and actions when she was younger, was crippling. Now in her seventies, she’s had to slow down and she appreciates seeing things she’s previously passed by. “Aging means time to relax, to notice, to let the awareness seep in, to sit around the fire and think about things, really see things.”

Braid took up singing in a Vancouver choir, finding that “it felt as if every cell in my body was vibrating.” At seventy-seven she was terrified of singing solo. She did it though and became even more aware of how physical singing is.

We can look back at our lives and say, look what I survived. We can look back with appreciation and say, look what I discovered by remaining curious, look what joy came my way when I didn’t expect it. I expect Kate Braid will remain curious and will continue to write – that’s her passion, priority, and first love.

In her new memoir, Kate Braid looks back on her life with appreciation. “Braid reflects on the advantages of growing older,” writes reviewer Mary Ann Moore. Photo Rachel Lenkowski

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Mary Ann Moore

Mary Ann Moore is a poet, writer, and writing mentor who lives on the unceded lands of the Snuneymuxw First Nation in Nanaimo. Her recent chapbook of poems is Modern Words for Beauty (house of appleton). Moore leads writing circles and has two writing resources: Writing to Map Your Spiritual Journey (International Association for Journal Writing) and Writing Home: A Whole Life Practice (Flying Mermaids Studio). [Editor’s note: Mary Ann Moore has also reviewed books by Marie Metaphor Specht, Emily Carr (ed., Ann-Lee Switzer), Aislinn Hunter (ed.), Emma FitzGerald, Susan Alexander & Lorraine Gane, and Judy LeBlanc, for The British Columbia Review.]

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The British Columbia Review


Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie


Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster




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