Wind today.
So I go to the lake.
Cloud then sun, then cloud again.
This is good.
This is balance—the reason I like rain and snow, sunshine, warmth and sleet.
And the reason I could never live in Los Angeles.
reasons to save the planet
tiny parcels of pleasantness
Walking through the neighbourhood I pass a house where a young child runs out the front door and, as if thrilled by the sight of me, points to her mouth and says “I’ve got a loose tooth!” I tell her that’s exciting news. And that, apparently, is about the size of it. We’re done. She waves and goes back inside. A sort of unusual town crier.
Around a corner, a voice. I think it says hello. I’m not sure who it is or to whom it’s speaking. I feel a little like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, like when she’s walking through the forest, or passing the scarecrow or the tin man or one of those things that isn’t supposed to talk… but it does. I look around at parked cars, there’s no one. Then to my left I notice a boy, maybe nine, ten years old, half way up a tree. I laugh, tell him that he surprised me. I don’t think he meant to, he’s a lovely, earnest little boy. There’s a large wasp’s nest very close to where he’s standing and I ask him if he knows it’s there. He does. “I’m going to knock it down,” he says. He doesn’t think there’s any wasps in it. I say to be careful anyway and I continue on my way. He says he’ll be careful. “Thank you,” he says. “Goodbye.”
Arborial Ambassador?
And then a wee tot on the other side of the street, not yet two years old, still a bit wobbly on her legs and holding on to her mum’s hand. She’s dressed in mint green and as I pass I turn my head, catch her eye and in that moment, just a second really, I see her bright face, mouth, eyes, cheeks, all of it so wide open and smiling as if to say isn’t this just such a wonderful thing to be not yet two and dressed in mint green and walking with your mum in the sunshine… I mean isn’t it just???
A pastel shot of B12, a tonic, that lingers.
i’m nobody’s gardener
I don’t garden.
I plant things and do what I can to keep the weeds at bay. 
But the weeds usually win.
I used to care. Used to fret about weeds winning. It used to be that I couldn’t sit on the patio after working for hours in the garden, fretting and fussing and weeding, couldn’t sit down at last and just say, “Well, that looks good.”
Because I’d notice something askew. Or how the tall blue things were in front of the short yellow things.
I used to care that delphiniums fell over in the rain.
Then one day I got rid of the delphiniums.
And anything else that was a bit precious. Or incapable of weathering the weather.
The yard became less garden and more Place Where Things Grow or Don’t Grow; It’s Up To Them.
Oh, what a happy day when I stopped being a gardener and started being someone who could sit on the patio at the end of the day and say, well isn’t that a lovely sight.
Without fretting about colour combinations and bloom time and height and things keeling over untidily.
Untidy is hardly noticeable in my ungardenly garden. 
So if things are lovely, it has nothing to do with me.
After I stopped being a gardener, I sat on the patio one night and said out loud, “Well, doesn’t everything look wonderful”, and a young girl who was on the patio with me said what a funny thing for an adult to say. “Usually adults complain about things,” she said.
So true.
Because we think we’re in charge.
why are we here?
In the parking lot at the beach, I mean.
Because there are never no cars here.
But not everyone gets out, not everyone walks, not even along the pier. Most people don’t, in fact. They choose, instead, to sit in their cars. Most are alone, some eat, some read, others might be listening to music. (Surprisingly few appear to being staring at devices.) I suppose some talk, on the phone, to themselves. There’s a kind of unwritten code that you don’t look at someone in their car, that they’re here not to be seen, but for some other purpose, something private, if only to contemplate the universe in the shape of a seagull.
I try to follow the code but notice the man to my left smiles as he stares out his window. It’s a grey day, nowhere near sunrise or sunset and I wonder what he’s watching, thinking.
I wonder why he’s in this parking lot at almost noon on a Sunday. Is he a widower, a bachelor, recently tiffed and needing to get out of the house to cool off or is there a happy partner at home glazing a ham?
An Asian man walks past toward the pier. Grey hair, slightly stooped; something about the way he grimaces against an only slight and not very cold breeze, pleasure mixed with something else, reminds me of my dad who was at no time Asian.
But then our looks are always the least of things, and yet…
Maybe it’s this: maybe we’re simply here to watch each other, to catch a glimpse of something that’s real, to be reminded.
in this tiny space was everything
Years ago I lived in a tiny furnished apartment on the second floor of an old Toronto house — and in this tiny space was everything I needed.
A single closet the size of a phone booth in which I managed to hang all my clothes and all my coats, as well as store my shoes and winter boots.
A bathroom in the hall, shared with the woman in the apartment next door.
I heard her come and go but we never once, in all the time I lived there, met face to face.
At the end of the street, a fruit and veggie monger. In winter I would sometimes buy expensive tomatoes from some faraway place where tomatoes were grown to be luscious. I ate them with basil and listened to Joan Armatrading and Van Morrison and had a white cat and a bedroom made almost entirely of windows.
I once called a friend to come and eat tomatoes and basil with me and she came, expecting, I think, a whole lunch but it was just those perfect tomatoes.
Basil.
Oil and salt.
Joan Armatrading, and Van.
And it was enough.
gone fishin’
Please don’t tell me this season of light isn’t filled with magic…
How else to explain finding a perfect piece of beach glass in the dark?
♦
The very best to all for love, laughter, and time to breathe…
See you in the new year.
this sky at night, my own delight
There is evidence of activity at the shoreline—
Someone has shuffled about in the sand, skipping stones maybe, or staring at the horizon, cloud formations, a sailboat…
It’s almost as though someone else has been here.
But no. It feels too private, this place where I walk.
Except for the litter, the footprints, a name drawn with a stick, except for all that, surely I’m the only one ever to have been here.
Right now, that view, this red sky that delights me (possibly because I was a sailor in another life, a pirate according to a woman claiming to know such things; but I don’t like sailing, I explained. Ah, she said, that’s likely because I went down with my ship.)
—this sky
is mine.
And no one—not pirates nor stone skippers—has ever seen it exactly like this.
the hypnotic quality of squirrels
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
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.)
there oughta be a sign
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…
Matilda Magtree 