A million years ago when I first left home and moved to Toronto I met a woman, a potter. She had her own studio. I wasn’t yet twenty and she might have been twenty-four, twenty-six, something ancient…. I remember she was ancient.

A group of us were having dinner somewhere and at some point that seemed still early to me, the potter announced she had work in the morning so she would be heading out. But we were having such fun, and it was Friday, why would she want to leave? And what did she mean: work in the morning?  Tomorrow was Saturday and she worked for herself, no one was telling her what to do. I said as much, hoping it would convince her to stay but she explained (in the way of ancient people) that that was just the point, that if she didn’t impose discipline on herself there was no one out there who would. And then she’d get nothing done.

She wasn’t defensive or condescending about it and she didn’t say it from any kind of *aren’t-I-clever* place. It was simply the way it was.

I never saw this person again and have no memory of what she looked like, but I’ve never forgotten what she said and it wasn’t until decades later when I began working from home that her words, still rattling around my head, suddenly rang crystal clear.

♣

“When I think about what sort of person I would most like to have on a retainer, I think it would be a boss. A boss who could tell me what to do, because that makes everything easy when you’re working.” — Andy Warhol

Perusing a stack of free books found earlier today on the sidewalk outside an old red cedar shingle house where a young couple, busy renovating, told me the books were left by the previous owner, and their dog, a white short-haired puppy with a super happy tail licked my hand.

♥

Don’t tell me about the weather.

Tell me about rain and sun and wind and the full moon or the new moon and what you are doing with it, the sound of your howling, the colour of lichen at sunrise, the view from where you sit and what your most recent conversation with the cat was about.

Here it was seals.

But it’s often about seals with us.

♥

A friend tells me buttercups remind her of childhood joy but they don’t grow where she lives and so naturally a few from my lawn are now pressed, in an envelope on their way to her.

♣♣♣

When I was a kid my dad’s answer to questions he didn’t know the answer to was either: get the atlas, or call the library.

The atlas was The Reader’s Digest Great World Atlas, which we’d open on the kitchen table, the two of us elbow to elbow, turning pages not only of maps and places but a double page spread of gemstones, the solar system, constellations, migratory routes of birds, the spread of mammals across continents, the evolution of man across those same continents; it had charts called What the World is Eating, Religions of the World, Patterns of Climate, Life in the Sea, The Vertical Distribution of Clouds, showed the distance between cities and countries, how hot, how cold, how wet, here or there, pages and pages of answers to every question anyone could possibly come up with. We easily spent hours forgetting what my original question was.

That said, it wasn’t infallible. For instance, neither my dad nor the atlas knew if I really had to make THIRTY copies of the chain letter I’d been sent. Could I not just make two or three, I asked. He didn’t know. The atlas didn’t know. Call the library! he said. And I did. And they (am I imagining a stunned pause at their end) answered. Yes, they said, they were pretty sure I could make just a few copies and not be struck down with a plague of locusts. I still feel a certain relief and gratitude for that (official library) advice, not to mention a sense of lifelong preparedness against a threat of locusts.

I still rely on them.

And I still have the atlas, which still conjures up a special kind of wonder.

Semi-distant view from an umbrella’d table on the cool lawn outside a harbourside resto in an old house whose spicy fish wraps with extra jalapeno sauce I’m quickly becoming addicted to and where our server is Charlotte two days running, whose mother works in a lighthouse and where on another occasion and with another server we are told of Arthur the resto’s friendly ghost and the woman who lived her whole long life alone in only a few rooms of the enormous house across the street.

The blueberry bread pudding is also quite heavenly.

Unpacking more or less done and now at that place where we are naming the new ‘hood in the event we ever have to call in a location, as in “out of mustard at Toad Point, bring reinforcements, mayo is not necessarily a substitute”, that kind of thing.

So far we have the above plus First Point, Little Point, Far Point, Around the Bend, and What’s the Point.