the hypnotic quality of squirrels

October 10, 2014April 7, 2015 ~ carin ~ 8 Comments

Driving from point A to point B… I pass a body of water that sparkles like a cliché in this autumnal way that can’t be ignored. I turn the car around, park, walk directly to it.

I’ve been here before but never noticed the ‘canoes only’ sign. I wonder if that means kayaks too. I would argue a kayak is a canoe made for people who would rather not tip over…

I’m immediately not sorry I allowed this diversion from point A to point B.

I meet a smiling man and woman with cameras and tripods, they ask if I saw him. Him who, I say and they tell me about an eagle, a baby bald eagle, swooping majestically… just there. They point. I point in the opposite direction and explain I was watching ducks and geese dunk their heads. They continue to smile, but I think a little less sincerely.

On the woodsy trail, a few children with parents. The kids squeal with pleasure at the squirrels, as if they’ve never seen one. A boy’s voice over the others: “These squirrels are mesmerizing…” and even though I agree (I’m a veteran squirrel watcher), I can’t help feel he’s just elevated their watchability cred even more.

I take the road less travelled that leads past open fields on one side and the forest on the other. About twenty or so metres ahead, a white-tailed deer leaps across, from field to woods.

There is no picture to document this, only milkweed and asters.

After that a gang of turkeys shows up.
Fortunately they shuffle off into the woods without incident.

This is tempting. I would only need to install bookshelves and a fridge.

Before I leave I run into a few more people: an older couple on a tricycle built for two. And a very young couple, she, chatty with long fire-hydrant-red hair and he, merely besotted, unassuming in his oh-so-thin-Goth look, walking beside her. They could be spending the day anywhere, but they chose here, and it pleases me when she cries out Oh, look, a chipmunk!

Another young couple, the dad in jeans and a top hat, the toddler being followed by a herd of ducks fresh out of the pond, the mum getting it all on film.

A swimming hole.

And then onward, to point B.

22 hours in bear country

August 21, 2014August 28, 2014 ~ carin ~ 19 Comments

Arrival in bear country is similar to arrival anywhere.

It begins with fries.

And moves from there along a lane through many trees…

—to a house on a lake across which I’m ferried to a patio with a view.
Caesar salad and veggie wraps are involved.

And then back via nautical means—and views of bear habitat.

And habitats among the bears.

Eventually returning to the house at the end of the lane for quite a bit of this…..

—with exactly the right amount of that…

All the while, plenty of citronella-scrunching to let the mozzies know who’s boss.

Here’s a pink one giving the citronella two fingers.
And chatter. Much chatter. And bbq’d salmon. And later an attempt to sit by the dock, thwarted by the absence of light. A decision I don’t question because those trees look much bigger in the dark, and so very much better for bears to lurk behind —bibs tied around their mammoth necks, knives and forks at the ready, lips smacking… Thank god for the absence of light I say.

Instead, we chatter some more and only when voices and stamina give out do we call it a night, and then in my room I find a magic lamp. It has no buttons. You merely approach it with a what the? where’s the frigging button? and it senses your need and lights up. A copy of The Antigonish Review magically appears.

There are large windows and no curtains and again I wonder about the lurking bears pressing their muzzles against the glass, breaking through, ransacking my overnight bag for snacks. And wouldn’t you know it I happen to have a small container of peanut butter in my purse, snatched from the diner where I had breakfast last weekend.

I try to put this out of my urban mind, concentrate on the winning stories from the 2013 Sheldon Currie Fiction Contest, the plan being to read them, but my eyes are doing that closing thing that no matter how much you try to force yourself to stay awake you just keep going over exactly the same three words.
I give up trying to read or to survive imminent bear attacks and then, as if sympatico to my mood, the magic lamp goes dark with but a touch, or was it a wave?, of my hand.

More magic: the dark hours are over in mere moments and the new day is is all trees and I sit outside and write about vertical things.

There is breakfast.

And a walk with bells on.

And by the time I leave bear country, I have learned three things:

1) There are no shortage of bees in these parts.

2) The essentials for survival are simple:

3) Most importantly, should a bear manage to break through your curtain-less windows in search of your contraband peanut butter, or is drawn to you by the scent of recently BBQ’d salmon on your breath, or you encounter one anywhere else, whatever you do, do not buy the myth of playing dead. This, apparently, only assures the bear that you are in fact deceased and it will use you as a hacky sack. (This comes to me via my house-in-the-trees-at-the-end-of-the-lane host, and is largely paraphrased. But you get the point.) (Oh, and it only goes for black bears. If you encounter a grizzly, do whatever you want, you’re pretty much toast.)

two things for a holiday monday

August 4, 2014August 26, 2014 ~ carin ~ 6 Comments

1. Dear Moody Long Weekend Mornings… that conspire to keep their skies grey long enough to insist that I linger in bed fluffed with pillows and layered with pages—books, newspapers—and a pot of tea. Peppermint. Sometimes even going so far as to demand I have a square of dark chocolate.

My deep gratitude.

AND 2. Dear Literary Press Group… who sent me a box of books that fit so well in the above-mentioned fluffing and layering. And all I did was like you on FB. How lovely you are, but please know my like is sincere and goes beyond any number of books (having said that, please also know I am beyond thrilled).

As for the books, well, they are perfectly exquisite gifts. The cover of each is a joy in itself.

I’ve already dived deeply into Rosemary Nixon’s Are You Ready to Be Lucky? because how can I do otherwise with an opening that goes: “Roslyn high-steps up Bantry Street on an icy Alberta evening buffeted by late-December gusts, holding high her sixty by forty centimetre tray of pineapple-stuffed meatballs, trying not to look like a woman who, at the yearly No Commitment Book Club Christmas gift exchange, received a can of gravy and… How to Seem Like a Better Person Without Actually Improving Yourself…”

There is also The Wondrous Woo, by Carrianne K.Y. Leung, and The Fleece Era, poetry by Joanna Lilley, which I’ve only peeked at and already love—not to mention that exquisite stock, the typeset, the black flyleaf. The words, did I mention the words? “I don’t look at paintings/ but at the walls on which they hang.”

Then there’s Swarm by Lauren Carter, a mildly dystopian novel about “a world only one turn of the dial from our own”, and a matter of survival by fishing, farming and beekeeping. My sort of thing. Finally—as if this bounty isn’t enough—A History of Breathing, a play by Daniel MacDonald that, based on a quick scan, I can’t wait to properly spend time with.

All of which to say: a thousand thanks, dear Literary Press Group. A box of books is no small event in this house.

there oughta be a sign

May 16, 2014May 17, 2014 ~ carin ~ 4 Comments

The path in the park forks into a circle around a small copse.
It doesn’t matter if you go left or right, you’ll eventually come back to the same place. If you go left you get to the bluebells and trilliums sooner. I go right.
I like to save the good stuff.

There’s a tree, a shrub really, in pale pink blossom. A wild thing I’ve never noticed it before. I’ll pay attention this year and see what it becomes.

This reminds me of the apple tree I passed on the way in, how all that windfall fruit last year made good crumble. And a few meals for the squirrels until the ice storm happened. Most of the trees in the area were badly broken but, magically, the apple tree was spared. I make a note to check for blossoms on my way back.

I see that the fiddlehead ferns—ostrich ferns—are past their fiddlehead stage.
It always happens so quickly and I haven’t even had any yet this year.
Another note: find some and eat.

And how does a single daffodil appear on a forest floor unless planted by someone? Well done, someone! Because if you had to be a daffodil, this would be the life to choose. So much better than the claustrophobic hysteria of mass plantings.

I see my first forsythia. Out here anyway. The actual first was in Toronto. But it always is. All that concrete has an encouraging effect on blooms.

And here’s something peculiar: I’ve never noticed the dogwood that lines the creek. How is that possible? I’ve walked here for years.

And this is new also: what looks to be a cucumber among the still-to-be-cleaned-up ice storm debris. Though I think it’s bound to be trampled on well before it finds its way to a crust-less sandwich.

Poor thing. The world needs more cucumbers.

I’m tempted to make a sign…

welcome to my dream(s)

May 12, 2014May 13, 2014 ~ carin ~ 6 Comments

One of my favourite new discoveries—The Sketchbook Project.

Such a clever idea by the people at the Art House to share and promote various forms of art—and have fun doing it. Imagine.

Anyone can join for the price of a blank book, which is then ‘arted up’, sent to New York, digitalized, and then sent on a tour across North America with some very nice stops in the process, including both the MOCA and the LACMA in Los Angeles, Toronto’s Distillery District, Vancouver, Portland, Houston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Santa Fe, and others, before returning to its permanent home on the shelves of the Brooklyn Art Library, where anyone can visit at any time.

Here’s a great little write up by Ashville BookWorks, in North Carolina, where the exhibit rolled through (in a custom built bookmobile) in March.

My contribution — I am Somewhere — a collection of dreams (yes, mine) with illustrations in collage. (What else does one do with dreams?? And am I the only one who, when explaining a dream to a friend, begins with that vague sense of being “somewhere…” and if I am [the only such one], what do other people begin their dream-telling with? And if you don’t tell dreams, why not? And if you don’t dream… um, Freud has something to say about that; can’t remember what.)

Anyway, it was a great lark and I thoroughly enjoyed the two winter afternoons devoted to it. Nice to exercise a different muscle. And thank you, dear local library for your abundance of cast off magazines.

Here’s a sample of the madness:

**
I’m somewhere,
reading about owls
and how their wings
make no sound
(there is down involved in this magic)
and then I fall asleep and in my dream I dream about
owls flying in a line across
the sky… but my double dream state
doesn’t believe that they are really owls
even though their chubby cigar shape
is unmistakable.
They fly to the west (my left)
and then disappear bit by bit
in puffs of smoke
or clouds
or swirled air.

More somewheres here.

in search of bloodroot

May 9, 2014May 9, 2014 ~ carin ~ 11 Comments

I set out this morning to see if the bloodroot had opened. I’d noticed leaves and buds curled up near the creek the other day. En route I pass the man who I usually see in his plaid bathrobe taking out the recycling… today in a Canadiens jersey, laying out a tarp to dry on his driveway.

A long-haired Alsatian chases a black squirrel with a brown tail while the dog’s person calls something like Jingles! and a cat in a window looks smug.

There’s a house where daffodils and red tulips bloom—dozens of them—it’s the only place that has more than one or two and, weirder still, they look like they’ve been there for weeks and I wonder how this can be.

Over here a truck delivers a load of sod and topsoil and over there a couple of chairs on a front porch look ready for a mug of tea. Further along, a grease stain in a shape that can’t be overlooked and which I add to my collection.

There are reminders everywhere of December’s ice storm.

And on various curbs, a total of three toilets, one bathtub, two sinks and a countertop.

I notice the hockey net around the corner has been replaced by a basketball hoop and a skipping rope abandoned on a lawn beside a pair of mittens.

There is a thing I don’t recognize.

And a song that I do.

And the Italian man with the garden near the park is walking around his patch of still bare earth, smoking, figuring out where the tomatoes and beans and zucchini will live this year. Rotation is good.

There’s wild ginger.

And tame things.

And then, by the creek, one of my favourite oddly named things…

pawsing the mantra

January 26, 2014January 26, 2014 ~ carin ~ 3 Comments

When—cross-legged on the living floor, palms up, silently reciting my ohms—I hear a rustling in the tissue paper next to me… I open my eyes and count this as part of my meditation.

And when tail and paws and one side of striped and whiskered face are sufficiently clean, another shuffle and re-shifting in cardboard nest is followed by stillness… then a deep breath is drawn—and we both close our eyes, Zen master and student.

fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh and twelfth gifts of the season

December 30, 2013December 30, 2013 ~ carin ~ 10 Comments

5. Discovering that dinner at my nephew’s would not be a turducken as he’d threatened, but free-standing birds along with perogies, couscous and snuffing [stuffing to the rest of the world]. Preceded and followed by impromptu salsa dancing.

6. The way Elizabeth Simcoe led me to the origins of the word spinster.
A noble word!

7. Learning that unicorns are real. [Seems they’ve been heard by certain people of short stature who know about these things. They sound like reindeer.]

8. Preparing the annual package of food and clothing that’s then left on a dark and deserted and slightly rundown street with a note reading Merry xmas to whoever finds this. The two best parts: picking out the stuff that goes into it, and wondering about the moment it’s found.

9. The doves. They’d been gone from the backyard for several seasons but earlier this year, after our little tortoiseshell girl died, they returned the very next day and have stayed. And in the most wonderful way this doesn’t feel insignificant.

10. Lunch with a friend. Fries, calamari, kale salad, a glass of chilled Canadian riesling… but mostly the part that had nothing to do with food or wine.

11. Home. Breath. Arms. Legs. The sound of a furball purring. You know, the good stuff.

12. A walk to buy lemons and seeing that the hockey net from last year has returned. I don’t know who sets this up but, like a weird Inukshuk, it tells me whoever it is, is still about. I’m glad they’re well.

***
The first four gifts are here.

the first, second, third and fourth gifts of the season

December 14, 2013February 23, 2015 ~ carin ~ 11 Comments

The first gift was finding my old lumber jacket in the trunk of my car, in my Survival Box, which also included a flashlight that didn’t work and inedible chocolate.

The second was doing the debit machine at the grocery store without my glasses and when it said did I want cash back I pressed ‘Yes’ by mistake. I swore and the cashier said “Everything alright?” I said it was and happily received $20. I felt rich.

#3 was receiving a xmas card from a friend I worked with almost 40 years ago and haven’t seen since. It occurred to me that it’s a small miracle we’ve managed to keep in touch through all our moves. We’ve never talked on the phone, or exchanged email addresses. The only time we’re in touch is December, with whatever words can fit on the inside of a card… no white space.

The fourth was a passage recently stumbled over in Douglas Coupland’s 2004 Souvenir of Canada 2. The original is also a joy. As is City of Glass.
My favourite kind of reading: words about the ordinary laid down in such a way that makes you realize nothing is ordinary…

This is from a piece called ‘Zzzzzzzzzz…. The Sleepy Little Dominion’, essentially a love letter to Canada. It begins with the memory of hatching Canada goose eggs in a Johnny Walker box with his brother.

“When [they] hop out of their eggs, they’re turbocharged little bundles of fluff-packed fun… goslings are alert, affectionate, trusting, curious, loyal and entertaining—the exact characteristics we also treasure in our human friends. It was pure delight to watch them tumble and peep daily across our lawn, pond, patio and (J-Cloths in hand) kitchen floor. Because of their innocence, everything was permitted.”

They become part of the family, snuggling for naps with humans and family dog alike.

“By August, though, there was no denying that [they] were now geese, and the time had come for them to fledge… As we had no rules to follow, we simply corralled them … at the top of the cul-de-sac and ran down the hill flapping our arms—and they followed us.”

He goes on to describe watching the first moment of their flight and even though they immediately return to the yard, “you could sense the wildness leaking into their souls.”

Eventually the birds do leave and settle, temporarily, at a nearby lake and when Coupland and his brother call them, they still respond, and even return to the house a few times.

“But then came the next year, early spring. The geese would come home just once. They would land on the roof, always in the morning, and they would honk as if the world depended on it. In robes and T-shirts, we’d run out onto the lawn to look at them there on the roof’s apex. Once they’d seen us, there was a brief moment when it wasn’t humans and geese, but simply a group of friends happy to be together and alive.

“Then off they flew. Just like that. They’d done their duty, and now they vanished into the wild. I’ve spent my life trying to articulate just what that specific wild was they returned to, for that wild is Canada, and when I think of this country, I think of where the geese go when they leave home.”

***
Gifts five to twelve are here.

pinning, pining and penning

December 6, 2013December 6, 2013 ~ carin ~ 8 Comments

So the other day I was repairing clothespins.

Because, yes, I hang my clothes on a line. Two lines, actually. In good weather, outside, on a circular thingy. And in bad weather, or in winter [for everything but sheets, which go outside year-round], a line in the basement. The clothespins I use are wooden, held together with an ingenious metal squiggly [there may be an even more technical name for it that I’m unaware of]. It delights me to what is probably an unusual degree that somewhere there is a factory making these tiny works of art, that they are still necessary and that [while they’re also made in plastic] for the most part they haven’t become scientifically enhanced, engineered or in some other way ‘improved’.

There are the dolly peg kind as well but I never got the hang of using them. As a child I was taught the art of laundry, using the wooden/metal squiggly kind and it would be like breaking rank… plus, to be honest, they annoy me because once they break it’s finito la musica… They can’t be repaired.

Unlike the avec metal-squiggly version.

Which brings me back to my point.

I was sitting at the kitchen table, fixing a basket of broken clothespins and thinking: well, this is pathetic. Shouldn’t I be doing something grander than this?? Shouldn’t I be at work on that next great novel, the one that will allow the world to continue turning? Shouldn’t I be penning brilliance of a poetic or opinionated nature, blazing trails in form and incomprehensible voices with short fiction, or hammering away at something entirely made up, like creative non? Shouldn’t I be painting? Or compiling something? At the very least, shouldn’t I move that bag of leaves to the compost?

And as much as logic wanted to say damn right, another part, much brighter than logic, kept insisting that, no, these clothespins were where it was at right now and that these few moments of tending to something so mundane were to be relished, that there was a gift in the seemingly ‘backwardness’ of this kind of work. I thought of my dad, a master of fixing things; he’d prefer that route any day to buying new, and it had nothing to do with saving money. It just pleased him to take the time to repair something. There was the satisfaction with the end product of course, but it occurred to me as I mended those pins that part of what he enjoyed may well have been the meditative quality of mindless but worthwhile tasks… the sort of thing we’ve gotten out of the habit of doing in our never-ending search for faster, better, easier, more—as we get sucked into thinking we don’t have time for this sort of thing in our clever-clever Jetson world—but if we’re honest we waste more than mere minutes doing a lot less of value… it’s just that we do it with things shinier than clothespins.

Anyway, the point [at last] is this: what a difference I felt once I allowed myself the luxury—a sliver of time to do this wee job—once I allowed myself the odd and simple pleasure of it rather than feeling I must always and forever be getting on to something more important…

Important being decidedly relative.