ORDINARY VAGABOND step by step, every day

And So It Comes to an End . . . . .

2014-12-09T15:03:00.001-08:00

“Regular maps have few surprises: their contour lines reveal where the Andes are, and are reasonably clear. More precious, though, are the unpublished maps we make ourselves, of our city, our place, our daily world, our life; those maps of our private world we use every day; here I was happy, in that place I left my coat behind after a party, that is where I met my love; I cried there once, I was heartsore; but felt better round the corner once I saw the hills of Fife across the Forth, things of that sort, our personal memories, that make the private tapestry of our lives.”

- Alexander McCall Smith, Love Over Scotland

“A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.”

- Joan Didion

And so this comes to an end. This all started with a little house across the street. A house that, in the course of one decision, became empty-eyed and lonely, became derelict and of the past. This bantam house that I had thought would always be there, because it always had. It was a part of the tapestry, the fabric, of my place.

When it became evident that the house was to be torn down, that the weave of the tapestry was to be utterly altered, it made me stop to ponder what ‘place’ is. How place can be ephemeral or enduring. How place can be eternal or impermanent, perpetual or flitting. So, I opened my eyes, became present in my ‘place’. I found things I loved, things I didn’t.

I spoke of trains, and rain, and trails, and rivers, cobwebs, clotheslines, and dogs. I spoke of bad decisions, bad vibes, and ghosts of the past. Of leaves, and storms, local heroes, and fog. I mulled the sadness of lost streams, and the high meditative quality of cups of clouds. These are all of my ‘place’, of my ‘sense of place’.

I have come to an end of writing about this place, of this moment, at this time, which of course had to happen at some point. I will, I suppose, write of other things, other places, other sorts of places, in other places. Place actually never really ends – the stories of place never really end. Because, as the writer Amy Tan has said: “That is the nature of endings, it seems. They never end. When all the missing pieces of your life are found, put together with glue of memory and reason, there are more pieces to be found.”

More pieces, and more places, more bits of my life and shards of my experiences. Someday, someplace.

Of Ghosts and Burdens

2014-11-25T18:12:00.004-08:00

“In one aspect, yes, I believe in ghosts, but we create them. We haunt ourselves.”

- Laurie Halse Anderson, Wintergirls

“Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what.”

- Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

“Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.”

- Ray Bradbury

My place is a place of burdens. It has its proverbial skeletons in the closets and ghosts in the ground. Most small towns do. The histories and pasts of small towns are built, after all, on human foibles.

A former mental asylum sits atop a wooded hill overlooking the town. Most of it is disused now, abandoned, its stone exterior crumbling to sand and its lime-washed interior falling to heaps of rotting timber and insect-infested detritus. Where the walls still stand, the institutional colours of green or pale yellow glow in patches of the decaying elements mixed with the lime for strength – water glass, glue, egg white, milk, soil, pig’s blood.

Below the asylum is 1,000 acres of wooded land, now the domain of turtles, herons, and community gardens. But at one time this was a farm worked by the inmates of that mental asylum on the hill. The farm produced enormous quantities of hay, vegetables, honey, meat, and milk from one of the largest herds of diary cows in the area. It was considered a great agricultural and mental health treatment success. But I wonder, was this indentured labour, the inmates used much like prison gangs used to be? Or was it some enlightened medical procedure consisting of bright sunshine, fresh air, and hard exercise?

I recall the story of John Harvey Kellogg, the inventor of that famous corn flake. His sanatorium was run on the basis of his philosophies of nutrition, enemas, and exercise. He had ideas about holistic health, vegetarianism, intestinal health, and how patients benefited from these, at that time, unusual practices. But he had strange ideas about sexuality and was also a devout believer in eugenics.

Perhaps institutionalized people are always at the whim and mercy of those that feel they understand them and what it is that they need – whether that is true or not.

At one time, another farm adjoined this wonderfully productive one. But it became a place of many ghosts and appalling abominations. A serial killer is another skeleton in the closet of this small town. Now that farm is gone and there is instead a housing complex made up of homes, and schools, and playgrounds. Here the ghosts in the ground don’t have voices anymore – the intensity and magnitude of life in its everyday ordinary-ness suffocates them.

Perhaps ghosts are always at the whim and mercy of life lived large, and loud, and vital – whether that is true or not.

Meditation on Leaves

2014-11-15T13:23:00.001-08:00

“To hear never-heard sounds,

To see never-seen colors and shapes,

To try to understand the imperceptible

Power pervading the world;

To fly and find pure ethereal substances

That are not of matter

But of that invisible soul pervading reality.

To hear another soul and to whisper to another soul;

To be a lantern in the darkness

Or an umbrella in a stormy day;

To feel much more than know.

To be the eyes of an eagle, slope of a mountain;

To be a wave understanding the influence of the moon;

To be a tree and read the memory of the leaves;

To be an insignificant pedestrian on the streets

Of crazy cities watching, watching, and watching.

To be a smile on the face of a woman

And shine in her memory

As a moment saved without planning.”

- Dejan Stojanovic

“Anyone who thinks fallen leaves are dead has never watched them dancing on a windy day.”

- Shira Tamir

I live in a place of leaves. My place still retains some old growth forest, has quite a lot of second growth, and several species of trees not native to the region. Almost all of them are deciduous. The old growth forest that still stands in my neighborhood consists of predominantly Sitka Spruce. Closer to the streams are some Shore Pines, a sub-species of the Lodgepole Pine, but they like their feet wet and boggy. My place is on a high water table so one or two of the Shore Pines traipse up our street, finding the squelchy areas easily where they like to wiggle their toes.

There is quite a lot of Vine Maple, small but very prolific insofar as number of leaves are concerned. There are still one or two Elms, though most are gone, and a couple of Horse Chestnuts, their burred and barbed seeds littering the ground in the fall, followed by their leaves. Red Alder, Black Cottonwood, some Rowan trees, and Black Locust, all add to the cascades of leaf fall in the autumn. And Maple trees, from small-leafed Japanese maples to the leaves of Oregon Maple – which can be as big as dinner plates. Lots and lots of Maples.

They say the grandeur of trees is gone when raking leaves. That when faced with a lawn of leaves up to your knees that you quickly forget the charm of the trees from whence all this foliage came. What was once beauty and shade becomes a chore.

I love raking leaves – I love that it happens when the air is nipping-cold, when the lawnmowers have become quieted; when there is a peacefulness that accompanies the scritch, scritch of the rake in the leaves and the sniggering of birds at the feeders. I love that at times I will rake and uncover wondrous fungi and mushrooms – in every colour from white to purple, and from every size from thumb nail, to bucket-sized. They don’t appear until the leaves are there to hide their murky and covert journey to the surface of the soil. I love how I uncover the secret stashes of squirrels, little piles of nuts they had hoped to remember to find again. If a squirrel is watching while I rake he will come down from a tree when he thinks my back is turned and steal them back, indignant and a little chagrined about his dodgy wee memory.

We are not allowed to burn leaves in my place. Apparently it is environmentally toxic. Which I understand, and comply with, but it is also a sensual regret. When I was a child, the final ceremonial step in raking leaves was to set fire to them. My brother and I tended the bonfire. Long into the evening we would poke and putter about the fire, inhaling the heady smell of burning leaves. Our faces would become smudged, our hands dirty, our clothes as thick with the smell of dry vegetation as a wool coat in a peat barn. The synthesis of low evening light, perhaps the streaking of pink and gold as the sun set, the gloom approaching on cat’s paws, and the nose-pinching smell of the bonfire, coalesced into a memory that is still so strong today in my old age that I can physically inhale it.

Leaves are not meant to be bagged up in over-priced ‘bio-degradable’ bags that line up in a row next to the garbage cans, or even worse in plastic ‘compost’ bags. Leaves are certainly not meant to be vacuumed – the full-mouthed sound of the machinery shattering the deadened air of autumn. We compost, but something is lost in the ritual

I love raking leaves. I love even, but only in a meditative mind, when I am finished and turn around and see that the breeze and the trees have conspired to re-carpet the lawn. Begin again. Begin again. Meditation on a breezy, leafy autumn day.

Of Dogs and Heaven

2014-11-08T18:30:00.003-08:00

“Dogs do speak, but only to those who know how to listen.”

Orhan Pamum, My Name is Red

“The conclusion I have reached is that, above all, dogs are witnesses. They are allowed access to our most private moments. They are there when we think we are alone. Think of what they could tell us. They sit on the laps of presidents. They see acts of love and violence, quarrels and feuds, and the secret play of children. If they could tell us everything they have seen, all of the gaps of our lives would stitch themselves together.”

Carolyn Parkhurst, The Dogs of Babel

My place is a place of dogs. With its many meandering trails, its circuitous rivers, and duck-populated lakes, it is the sanctum of canine blessedness. I have never gone from one point to any other, regardless of the mode of conveyance, without encountering at least one dog. Most usually, many more.

There is fat Frank, an old black labrador whose girth is substantial and whose gait is wobbly and dawdling. His tail continually wags back and forth in a drowsy, sweeping constancy as though it is the key that has wound him up - and he will go and go until it stops. His owner plods along with him, letting him set the pace - slow enough to read her book as they go.

There is yappy, impertinent little Buddy, a self-important Pug. He has something to say about everyone and everything. His perch is the upper floor deck of a house that faces onto the street, his window on the world. He has political opinions, views about his consternation about what is happening in the neighborhood, and a general curmudgeon attitude. On the occasions that he is taken for a walk, he pulls vigorously at the end of his leash, rushing from here to there to push his flattened nose into all businesses.

There is three-legged Cody- a mutt of indiscernible heritage. He has been a dog of three (legs) for most of his life. He moves faster and is more agile than most four-legged dogs I know. His enthusiasm for life is palpable - he is like a sparking, electrical charge at the end of his lead.

There is a white Malti-Poo sort of dog that walks with his elderly lady friend daily past our yard. I watch them sometimes as they take their interminable time to walk past. The dog likes to stop at our yard to do his business. Sometimes the elderly lady notices I am watching. She makes a great show of pulling out a plastic bag, pulling it over her hands like a surgeon with his latex gloves. She holds her hand up in the air in preparation and then bends to the task. She makes a further show of scooping, and twirling, and tying - and with a great flourish, places the bag in her pocket. What !?! When I go out later, the poop is still there, not picked up at all.

Then there is Rocky, a powerful and belligerant Boxer. He is usually confined to the yard but on the occasions that he is left to run in the park, he has beaten up every dog he has met. He is like a big kid desperate for friends but prone to every social faux pas imaginable. His idea of play is everyone else’s idea of assault. He just needs an understanding friend. Kind of like Winnie the Pooh has his Piglet.

Out on the dykes, the dogs encountered are predominantly of the sporting type. There are balls and sticks and ducks to be fetched out of ponds and sloughs. In November there are fetid, stinking Salmon carcasses to roll in, the height of exultation and jubilance. It is a special place for dogs. Young puppies scuttle after butterflies and slugs, mid-aged dogs carry large sticks with great purpose and ambition, trotting along the trail leading their owners to the ‘sweet spots’. And old dogs shamble along - aching and wheezing, lifting their grizzled faces to the sun-warmed azure skies; inhaling deeply the essential odours of hay, and rabbits, and manure, and fish, and ducks, dandelions, and turtles - and thinking that life is pretty good.

And that when they do finally have to go, heaven is right here - in this place.

Of Development and Exhausted Passions

2014-11-04T08:24:00.003-08:00

“A sip of wine, a cigarette,

And then it’s time to go.

I tidied up the kitchenette;

I tuned the old banjo.

I’m wanted at the traffic-jam.

They’re saving me a seat.” - Leonard Cohen

“Ahhh, God's balls! The Horrible Halt!" Adoulla pronounced the Dhamsawaati term for the complete standstill of traffic with a familiar disgust.” - Saladin Ahmen, Throne of the Crescent Moon

My place is a place of disappointment sometimes. There is a road, an inland road named for a seaside place - the reason having to do with engineering, plots, and plats. When we first came to this place is was a main road in the same vein as many Main Roads in small towns. It was the longest and the widest, but it had traffic lights only at each end and the volume of traffic on it was no more than on a back-town residential street in a larger city.

In our first summer here, a man appeared at my door. He was short and swarthy, his hair heavily oiled. On this hot and humid day he wore a suit that was far too warm for the weather and fit him poorly. His tie was askew and he carried a clip-board.

“They are going to build an over-pass”, he blurted when I opened the door to him, “We must stop them”.

He went on, as sweat trickled down his face and his feet swelled in his shoes, about how it would change things, change everything. About how the traffic would increase, how people would lose their homes, how it would be an evil thing. You didn’t need to know the facts to know the passion. I signed his petition.

And the next year, the same oily-haired man again appeared in what looked to be the same over-warm suit, his sweat-moistened petition in hand; and again exhort and plead. He needn’t have tried so hard. I signed the petition - I would have signed it anyway.

My neighbours chuckled and shook their wise heads and told me how the threat of the over-pass had been there for over thirty years. That realtors never even mentioned it anymore to potential buyers - it was never going to happen. That the man was a yearly community joke.

But the little man was fervent and vehement. He was a man of foreign origins and at times his intensity was so extreme that the words of his own language would tangle with the words of his learned language and would create a paroxysm of sounds. You didn’t need to know the words to know the passion. I signed his petition.

Year after year, I signed his petition - for many years.

And then one year, houses were torn down on either side of the seaside place-named street. A concrete armature reached over the expanse of the railway yard that had formally been the division of north from south. It was an overpass, and its architecture rose high into the air and changed the skyline. It’s footings reached deep into residential streets and changed the flow and curve and the meandering dispositions of streets. The soft asphalt that had kept the imprints of dog’s feet or fallen leaves in its soft, impressionable tar was changed to concrete - grey, unending concrete. There are many traffic lights along the road now. There is traffic of brobdingnagian proportions.

And I remembered he had said, “It will change things, change everything”.

The little oil-haired man doesn’t come anymore. His breathless and avid speeches have been replaced with the constant shushing of constant traffic. His passion is spent and his cause was for naught. I fear he may have died of a broken heart, or at the very least lives lonely with the company of being right.

In any case, I miss him.

Storms & Tempests

2014-10-25T17:47:00.001-07:00

“It’s not a bad lesson to learn in the bleaker months: how you view a storm is a question of perspective; provided you find the right rock to watch it from, it could be the most incredible thing you’ll ever witness.”
- Dan Stevens

“I don't just wish you rain, Beloved - I wish you the beauty of storms...”

- John Geddes, A Familiar Rain

I live in a place of fierce Autumn storms. They are not frequent; my place is a place of fairly moderate weather most of the year. But when storms do happen they are usually of a most tempestuous and vehement sort. The rain is of biblical proportions, the wind formidable. The wind seizes the crowns of trees and makes them arch and curve in obeisance – genuflection and curtsy. Then tears their silly heads off and tosses them at their roots.

The rain, not the soft and dulcet succulent rain of summer, drives in pelleted force to the ground. It forces the sapped soil to leap and scrabble like a cat on glass. It wallops that soil until it relents and turns to quagmire – a bog of brown slurry bedecked with fallen leaves, twigs, and berries.

I have seen intrepid birds, too addle-brained or too late to take cover, tossed like a shuttlecock into and about the air. As I see them twirled and tumbled down the street, I fear for their little damp lives.

Our windows shudder and tremble; my bones fret and ache. I feel an intense need to check that our domestic creatures are inside and warm, that they are tucked and swaddled and safe. I worry about cold and wet birds; squirrels without tail enough to drape over their noses; moles with soggy parlours; and I even mourn the drenched, sodden earthworms – drowned and abandoned on the sidewalks as the storm tromps off.

Storms are repentant, though. They do try to atone. After haranguing us soundly, an Autumn storm always leaves a beautiful sky. An apology in pinks and yellows, and marshmellow clouds.

Drowned Leaves

2014-10-18T17:58:00.004-07:00

“Halfway home, the sky goes from dark gray to almost black and a loud thunder snap accompanies the first few raindrops that fall. Heavy, big drops, they drench me in seconds, like an overturned bucket from the sky dumping just on my head. I reach my hands up and out, as if that can stop my getting wetter, and open my mouth, trying to swallow the downpour, till it finally hits me how funny it is, my trying to stop the rain.

This is so funny to me, I laugh and laugh, as loud and free as I want. Instead of hurrying to higher ground, I jump lower, down off the curb, splashing through the puddles, playing and laughing all the way home . . . It taught me to understand rain, not to dread it. There were going to be days, I knew, when it would pour without warning, days when I'd find myself without an umbrella. But my understanding would act as my all-purpose slicker and rubber boots. “

- Antwone Quenton Fisher, Finding Fish: A Memoir

“There is an eternal love between the water drop and the leaf. When you look at them, you can see that they both shine out of happiness.”

- Mehmet Murat ildan

My place is a place of rain. On the West Coast, where rain-heavy clouds lumber in off the ocean, where the tall flora fingers of thirsty trees pluck the candy-floss bits from the sky and adorn their heads with them, pulling the wet down to their roots – here, rain is perpetual.

Once the autumn rains begin, we forget the essence of the summer’s amber sol, the luminous transparency of parched air. Instead we remember a language of rain – drizzle, mist, shower, deluge, torrent, mist, fog, cloudburst, condensation; the fall, the pouring, the spate of rain.

The leaves dribble bubbles of moisture from their tips like they have chronic post-nasal drip. The soil squelches and the sidewalks are slick. The last of the summer flowers that were struggling to maintain a bloom-ful presence well into the Fall, now bow their damp-blackened heads and evolve into compost.

I am most intrigued by drowned leaves. Deep in ponds, pocked violently by raindrops hard and steady, leaves cluster at the bottom, preserving their colour and form for as long as they can. Drowned, they keep their leaf-ness, while their ill-starred kin, beaten out of existence by the rain on the sidewalk, become grey ghost-leaf shadows patterning the wet autumn cement.

Ground Clouds

2014-10-13T15:14:00.001-07:00

“One day many years ago a man walked along and stood in the sound of the ocean on a cold sunless shore and said, "We need a voice to call across the water, to warn ships; I'll make one. I'll make a voice like all of time and all of the fog that ever was; I'll make a voice that is like an empty bed beside you all night long, and like an empty house when you open the door, and like trees in autumn with no leaves. A sound like the birds flying south, crying, and a sound like November wind and the sea on the hard, cold shore. I'll make a sound that's so alone that no one can miss it, that whoever hears it will weep in their souls, and hearths will seem warmer, and being inside will seem better to all who hear it in the distant towns. I'll make me a sound and an apparatus and they'll call it a Fog Horn and whoever hears it will know the sadness of eternity and the briefness of life."

- Ray Bradbury, The Fog Horn

“The fog comes on little cat feet. It sits looking over harbor and city on silent haunches and then moves on.”

- Carl Sandburg, 1916 Chicago Poems, Fog

My place is a place of fog and mists. Now that the autumn season has begun, mornings often begin within the deadened, smothered silence of fog. Upon waking, I feel the strange hush – no train sounds, no birdsong, the muffled hiss of morning traffic.

My world diminishes to what I can see within the bounded obscurity of the verges of the fog bank. Within the fog, what are usually the normal scuttles and flutters of the beginning mornings become heart-skipping thumps and thuds. Horror movies and such use the instrument of fog to good advantage. Sound is blunted but underscored; innocent, ordinary forms loom out of the murk abruptly and unpredictably. A simple tree, ignored in the usual transparency of bright sunlight, appears portentous, impending, startling me as though it has not been in the same place each and every day.

Cold sweat and disquietude aside, I do love the fog. I love how the world becomes temporarily black and white, like an artsy Parisian photo – all lines and shadows and contours. I love how fog softens the world, taking the jangle of our lives and dissolving it.

I used to tell my children that fog was a cloud that had fallen down. So, if that is true, then when walking through a fog, you may stumble upon angels.

Cobwebs and Gossamer

2014-10-08T22:00:00.001-07:00

“Spiders evidently as surprised by the weather as the rest of us: their webs were still everywhere - little silken laundry lines with perfect snowflakes hung out in rows to dry.”

- Leslie Land, The 3000-Mile Garden

“There are spiders living comfortably in my house while the wind howls outside. They aren't bothering anybody. If I were a fly, I'd have second thoughts, but I'm not, so I don't.”

- Richard Brautigan, The Tokyo-Montana Express

My place is a place of hundreds of spiders in the fall. The fall is mating season and, in an effort to expand their territory, webs and their resident spider inhabitants abound in spaces common and uncommon – trees, bushes, corners, walls, crannies, chinks, and crevasses. Their webs are organic feats of astonishment. It is a rare morning that I can move from the front door to the driveway without becoming draped in spider webs – the fibres sticky in my hair, my face enswathed in fine, tickling filaments. I stand in either reverence or consternation.

The spiders hang in pugilistic splendor in the middle of the webs, staring me down with a nervy confidence, sometimes running at me up a long line of silk like a dog at a stranger in the yard. She exhibits a bantam fearlessness, a dauntless valor.

I never mean to harm them, though I am not above a bit of teasing. I will sometimes give the web a slight tab, sending the fractious arachnid off in an indignant stomp to the middle of the web, where it sits and glowers, its legs curled up under it. It is not afraid of me. More offended and outraged.

My favourites are the cat-faced spiders. Their bodies look like the faces of cats, complete with pointed ears, eyes, and whiskers. They are quite large, and totally harmless. Another is the Daddy-Long-Legs spider. I love how his bulbous body hangs from his legs like a hammock. His incongruous body is like the bizarreness of a tortoise – ludicrous but graceful, peculiar but poignant.

The spiders will not be in my place long – once the eggs are laid, they will die. Their webs will gather dust and debris over the course of the winter and, in the spring, the egg sacs will explode. Tiny, Lilliputian spiders will mob down the indestructible silk tracings created by their mothers and they will troop out to the garden to begin their own predator lives in their macro spider world.

But, for now, they are very much in my world and in my place. We share a diffident respect.

Stumps

2014-10-06T23:56:00.000-07:00

“Fancy cutting down all those beautiful trees...to make pulp for those bloody newspapers, and calling it civilisation. - Winston Churchill, remarking to his son during a visit to Canada in 1929”

- John Vaillant, The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed

“But the trees seemed to know me. They whispered among themselves and beckoned me nearer. And looking around, I noticed the other small trees and wild plants and grasses had sprung up under the protection of the trees we had placed there.

The trees had multiplied! They were moving. In one small corner of the world, Grandfather's dream was coming true and the trees were moving again.”

- Ruskin Bond, Rusty, the Boy from the Hills

“Trees are poems that the earth writes upon the sky.”

- Khalil Gibran, Sand and Foam

My place is a place of legions of trees. It once was old growth forest, then new growth forest. Houses have been built with a mind to keeping trees standing – with exceptions. More and more exceptions.

Old, august trees still stand – bearded with moss and pocked with lichen. Younger trees grasp at clouds, urging themselves up to similar prominence.

But it is the stumps that make me sad. I have come across stumps with a hundred or more rings. The stumps of trees that felt they would stand forever. I have seen stumps that lovingly nurse new seedlings, and small toads, and multitudes of centipedes. The saddest stumps of all are those of chopped trees. I can bear the ragged tears and gnawed bark of felled trees – their battle with furious winds or blustering storms a foolhardy but lion-hearted one. Their heroic tales remain in the mulched litter at their rooted feet. They lived well and furiously.

But chopped trees meet a repugnant and brutal death. Their exposed stumps look like skinned carcasses, their ringed lives exposed and naked. The remaining stump is antiseptic and burnished – such that it cannot nurse anything else to life. How sad that is, that we do that to trees.

I wish, instead, that we humans were like the father of a character in a book by Jennifer duBois (A Partial History of Lost Causes), who’d “clap for trees he thought were doing a good job of exploding into red during the fall”. We would clap – and warble and exalt, as we sat upon a stump in the forest.

Lullabies by Trains by Night

2014-09-30T22:27:00.000-07:00

“I would like to visit the factory that makes train horns, and ask them how they are able to arrive at that chord of eternal mournfulness. Is it deliberately sad? Are the horns saying, Be careful, stay away from this train or it will run you over and then people will grieve, and their grief will be as the inconsolable wail of this horn through the night? The out-of-tuneness of the triad is part of its beauty.” - Nicholson Baker, A Box of Matches

Six express tracks and twelve locals pass through Palimpsest. The six Greater Lines are: Stylus, Sgraffito, Decretal, Foolscap, Bookhand, and Missal. Collectively, in the prayers of those gathered prostrate in the brass turnstiles of its hidden, voluptuous shrines, these are referred to as the Marginalia Line. They do not run on time: rather, the commuters of Palimpsest have learned their habits, the times of day and night when they prefer to eat and drink, their mating seasons, their gathering places. In days of old, great safaris were held to catch the great trains in their inexorable passage from place to place, and women grappled with them with hooks and tridents in order to arrive punctually at a desk in the depth, of the city.

As if to impress a distracted parent on their birthday, the folk of Palimpsest built great edifices where the trains liked to congregate to drink oil from the earth and exchange gossip. They laid black track along the carriages’ migratory patterns. Trains are creatures of routine, though they are also peevish and curmudgeonly. Thus the transit system of Palimpsest was raised up around the huffing behemoths that traversed its heart, and the trains have not yet expressed displeasure.

To ride them is still an exercise in hunterly passion and exactitude, for they are unpredictable, and must be observed for many weeks before patterns can be discerned. The sport of commuting is attempted by only the bravest and the wildest of Palimpsest. Many have achieved such a level of aptitude that they are able to catch a train more mornings than they do not.

The wise arrive early with a neat coil of hooked rope at their waist, so that if a train is in a very great hurry, they may catch it still, and ride behind on the pauper’s terrace with the rest of those who were not favored, or fast enough, or precise in their calculations. Woe betide them in the infrequent mating seasons! No train may be asked to make its regular stops when she is in heat! A man was once caught on board when an express caught the scent of a local. The poor banker was released to a platform only eight months later, when the two white leviathans had relinquished each other with regret and tears.”

- Catherynne M. Valente, Palimpset

My place is a place of trains. At a short distance from my home, the largest marshalling train yard in British Columbia spreads its breadth across 68 tracks. Grain arrives, coal leaves, spilled sulphur paints the tracks a garish dandelion yellow. Its 360-acre expanse did not suffer noticeably from the First World War recession, nor the fire of 1920 which destroyed the downtown of our small town, nor the flood of 1921 which flooded half the city and produced a mammoth log jam that pulled down two bridges. At one time, in the 1930’s, these trains carried silk from far destinations to far destinations; silk spun in the making of cocoons of evolution, and slipped lovingly through the fingers of grand ladies. It seems that the steadfast history and grit of the trains here is as perpetual and persistent as the repetitive clickedty-clack sound of metal wheels on metal tracks.

Clickedty-clack. Clickedty-clack.

Recently, relatives visited from the Interior. We sat on the back deck in the soft, summer air. At one point, the deck shook and an emphatic bang made the crows in the tree flash up, circle, and flutter back to their perches. We didn’t notice the tumult or the shudder, but our guests were alarmed. The rumbles, thuds, booms, claps, and clashes resounded throughout the afternoon. Interspersed with this orchestration were the plaintiveness, howling, or trumpeting of train whistles.

As I sat and made polite conversation amidst the bedlam of train, I became hyper-sensitive to the fact that, to someone unused to living near trains, these noises would seem clamorous, raucous, even deafening. But we don’t notice them anymore. Instead, these cannonades and trills are part of the fabric of the soundscape in which we live. The turbulence of train cars being shunted from track to track, the boisterousness of trains arriving to and leaving from the yard, carrying the wealth and treasures of nations and peoples, is exciting. Trains play in train yards like children in a playground – without inhibition, negligent of their glad-full noise.
We have learned the language of trains. Whistles and horns – babble, wailing, and lamentation. The sonance of communication. One long – I am approaching you. Three short – I am backing up. Multiple short – I am in trouble! Happy New Year, Happy Canada Day. Even one that means good night.

Good night, train.

Clothesline Choreography

2014-09-20T01:44:00.000-07:00

“There, in front of us, where a broken row of houses stood between us and the harbor, and where the eye encountered all sorts of stratagems, such as pale-blue and pink underwear cakewalking on a clothesline . . .it was most satisfying to make out among the jumbled angles of roofs and walls, a splendid ship’s funnel, showing from behing the clothesline as something in a scrambled picture – Find What the Sailor Has Hidden – that the finder cannot un-see once it has been seen. A brilliant, and moving, mixture of perception and reality”.

- Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

My place is a place of clotheslines. Which is exceptional, nowadays. When I was a child, I played amongst the ballooning sheets and pillow cases, imagining myself an explorer in caves of snow and ice; or as a princess in a swirl of ball-gown taffeta. When my own children were small they did the same thing. Spirited games of tag sometimes resulted in collapsed lines, the clothes in sodden heaps like languished mannequins.

When I lived, for a while, in the international housing complex of an American university, the joy of the clothesline was the joy of colour; of movement; of elegance. In a splayed, green pasture row upon row of clotheslines creaked in the wind, bedecked with billows of yards of colourful sari or turban cloths. African-patterned dresses, pants, and tunics capered alongside. Children screeched and laughed as they dove into the damp drapes of fabric, and babies lay on rugs under the clothesline, the sun-dotted sway of sheets sending them off to sleep.

The first community we lived in on arrival back in Canada did not allow clotheslines. Clotheslines were out-lawed by by-laws. The smell of over-dried clothes puffed from dryer vents, but not a single sock nor bra besmirched the piousness of barren back yards. I recall that as a child in England poverty-ridden tenements boasted lines of laundry that draped across the street from kitchen window to kitchen window. I imagine that it is that sort of image, in part, that creates the property value lowering connotation of clotheslines. ‘Airing your laundry’ is considered in bad taste. In that regard, I suppose that draping my t-shirts to dry over blueberry bushes or draping old dungarees over the back of wicker garden chairs could be perceived as a form of anarchism, or just low wages.

But my place does not have such silly by-laws. A breezy summer’s day is an invitation to allow one’s raimnants to flirt with the wind. I have heard of something called Project Laundry, which includes a collection of clothesline art and poems and essays that praise the joys of using a clothesline. Apparently, there are even clothesline consciousness-raising parties, and there is actually a National Hanging Out Day in the United States on April 19^th and a lobby to have weather-persons give drying forecasts each day.

I would love to see, again, pastures of colour and peek-a-boo children in the sheets; the ache of textile to free itself from clothes pegs and pins and dance a mad, dervish tarantella with the wind.

The Ghosts of Heroes

2014-09-14T23:22:00.000-07:00

“We are all ordinary. We are all boring. We are all spectacular. We are all shy. We are all bold. We are all heroes. We are all helpless. It just depends on the day.” - Brad Meltzer

“I took in a deep breath, and smoke twisted around my head as I let it slip through my teeth. “Do you know what my favorite show was when I was a little kid?”

The look again. “I would have no idea.”

“Doctor Who. British sci-fi show.”

“I am familiar with it. Christopher Eccleston, David Tennant, and Matt—“

“No,” I said. “The new show’s great, but I grew up on the old one. The low-budget, rubber monster show with Tom Baker and Peter Davison. I watched it on PBS all the time as a kid.”

I looked out at the dark ruins of Hollywood, at the stumbling shadows dotting the streets as far as you could see. The only other living person within half a mile was standing behind me, her eyes boring into my head.

“The Doctor didn’t have super-powers or weapons or anything like that. He was just a really smart guy who always tried to do the right thing. To help people, no matter what. That struck me when I was a kid. The idea that no matter how cold and callous and heartless the world seemed, there was somebody out there who just wanted to make life better. Not better for worlds or countries in some vague way. Just better for people trying to live their lives, even if they didn’t know about him.”

I turned back to her and tapped my chest. “That’s what this suit’s always been about. Not scaring people like you or Gorgon do. Not some sort of pseudo-sexual roleplay or repressed emotions. I wear this thing, all these bright colors, because I want people to know someone’s trying to make their lives better. I want to give them hope.” - Peter Clines, Ex-Heroes

My place is the place of heroes; of a young, idealistic young man, who fought the good fight but still lost. Running across a country, through chilling rain, and slogging snow, and unrelenting sun. Dipping his toe in one ocean with a vision to dipping it in the other ocean at the other end of the country.

Fate looks upon our silly human dreams with a bemused smile and a cruel attitude. To this day, I whisper wishes, I mutter expectations, murmur things with feathers. One cannot utter a hunger too loudly, the Fates listen at doors and walls, their ears straining round a glass tumbler. Don’t speak your dreams too loudly, the Fates will dash them.

Nonetheless, we honoured today the hitching, fettered run of a young boy who wanted to make a difference. The fact that 35 years later thousands gather to re-enact the hopefulness of a romantic lodestar means exactly that. A dying paladin made a difference. Despite the Fates.

Travels to Lilliput

2014-09-11T23:15:00.000-07:00

“Small things are not small things for the small!”

- Mehmet Murat ildan 

“Awesome does not look the same close-up as it does from far away”. - anonymous

“If you see something that moves you, and then snap it, you keep a moment”. - Linda McCartney

Awe and wonder come in many forms. There is awe in light - sunlight, moonlight, the light that crisps itself in molecules of snow. There is wonder in darkness – the soft, velvet wrap-around of a moonless, summer night; the shadows secreted in the bark-skin of a tree deep in the Cimmerian shade of the forest.

My place has awe and wonder that I didn’t even grasp until the wonder-full gift of a particular camera lens. A macro lens that acts as a circular doorway into the vast worlds of small beings and locales. Over the last year, I have been learning to see, learning to simply be ‘aware’. I am learning to open my eyes – to my place, to texture, shapes, curves, lines, patterns, light. My place has become like a Muse, constantly tugging at my mind or my heart to “Look! See! Wonder!” Now with the addition of this small lens, I am discovering secrets, bewitched confidences.

Ukrainian nature macro photographer, Vyacheslav Mishchenko, takes us into the diminutive, but movingly emotional, universe of snails. It is magical – the world seen through the eyes of a snail (or any other small creature) is full of pathos, poignancy, and joy, just as our own world is. His photography features snails enraptured by a drop of water; or stretching with ardent longing towards each other. Now I, too, can discover these other universes, these other ways of being.

Mishchenko advises, “I would ask a photographer to be patient, to develop artistic taste, to be romantic and finally to love nature”. How could I not be romantic or love nature, when disappearing down the small again, large again rabbit hole, like Alice in her wonder-land - in one instant too big, but in the next finding her way into another cosmos through a small door with an even smaller key.

I am fascinated by the minute, desiccated veins of drying leaves; by the grey worn wood of fences, and doors, and old barns that looks like old wool. By the glittering lines of a spider web that scores an evening sky; or the detail of shape and space in a crow’s shed feather. I had not noticed these infinitesimal textures or spaces before.

Thank you, my sweet, for with this gift of a small lens, you’ve made my world bigger.

Prairie Remembrance

2014-09-08T23:20:00.000-07:00

“The prairie skies can always make you see more than what you believe.”

- Jackson Burnett, The Past Never Ends

“Samuel finally understood the sound of the wind after all these years: The winds were a chorus of the prairie’s ever-present heartaches.”

- Andrew Galasetti, These Colors Don't Run

My place is not of this place. I travelled back to what was once ‘home’ this past weekend. To the prairie, of which I am still a part of, or of what is still a part of me. I peered out of the window of the airplane onto the counterpane of squares and shapes that delineated crops and pastures, coulees and slow, meandering river. I puzzled about whether I missed the prairies, I speculated on whether the wind could still mess with my head.

I felt that I, indeed, missed the coulees. The fatigue, the languor of the vast plate of prairie alleviated by the snug contours, the lineament, the idiosyncrasy of the folded, pleated coulees – I have missed them.

I felt that I have missed the sky. The sky that, especially on clear, star-gorged nights, felt like, from horizon to horizon, a star-painted dish had been upturned over my world and there is nothing but stars from my left to my right hand – arching over my head and pooling at my feet. Those skies have been unrecalled. I have missed them.

Or, sweeping across blue skies, pure and cerulean, the wisps of clouds known as mares-tails. Clouds like a veil, a nebulosity, ol’ buttermilk sky. Skudding across the sky in the endless, mindless wind that makes me feel like curtains are constantly billowing in my head, doors slamming and clattering in my mind.

Yet still, a dawdling, ambagious river counters the precipitate wind. If one can follow the curves and whorls of the river, then the wind that buffets the body and addles the mind can be tamed. I have missed lazy rivers, disinclined to be boisterous.

This place, the prairies, is no longer my place – at least not for the time between. But the absence of it still evokes a bereavement, a sorrow – a melancholy. And though I have come to feel the insistence of a my current place, my 'home', I miss the countenance of the prairie, the tempest that swirls my introspection.

Of Fen and Polder

2014-09-01T22:50:00.006-07:00

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.

Norman Fitzroy Maclean, A River Runs Through It

My paintings always feature trails that dissolve into mysterious areas, patches of light that lead the eye around corners, pathways, open gates, etc.

Thomas Kindade

My place is a place of magical trails. Each bend in the trail leads to a new view, a new perspective, a new way of seeing. The trail is bounded by two rivers. One is strong and staunch, forceful and stalwart. The other is down-reaching, rooted, and profound. A slough meanders its way alongside the trail, on one side to the powerful river – busy with fishing boats, and tugs, and huge barges heavy with sand or rock; with salmon and sturgeon. And on the other side to the deep river – cold, black, with seals bobbing their way from salt water to fresh, with osprey nests and hidden coves filled with lily pads, turtles, and standing herons.

A slough is defined as an area of swamp, characterized by lack of progress or activity. But myriad species of duck glide through its waters, otters and beaver present on a rare evening, bears trundle along its banks scooping spawning salmon up onto the trail for ursine family picnics – tired of the summer-long feed of blueberries from the farms that spread outward from the slough. The slough does not lack for activity or enterprise, it is just of the wild sort.

But the light in this magical place is what is special; sunlight filtered through green, water filtered through sunlight; skies of blue, or cloud, or rain filtered through the lens of elegance and grace.

Forks and Flowers

2014-08-30T18:00:00.000-07:00

'Lets fight the filth with forks and flowers.'  

- Richard Reynolds, On Guerrilla Gardening: A Handbook for Gardening Without Boundaries. (London: Bloomsbury, 2008)

“Often... visible outdoor areas are homogenous, cookie-cutter spaces, where neatly-trimmed grass or a few well-placed flower pots are admired and appreciated by the neighbors. But for some revolutionary gardeners, a feast for the eyes is not enough. They want something edible in return for the hard work, the water and the expense of tending a landscape. These food revolutionaries are maximizing their cultivation area by converting their landscapes, patios, and nearby vacant lots into productive edible gardens. In the quest for more space to grow food, even conventional front lawns are being transformed into maverick, and highly visible, vegetable plots.... the rise of modern vegetable gardeners who are cutting against the grain of current landscape fashion to grow food out in the open once again”

-Kari Spencer, quotation from Squidoo article Ground-Breaking: Making the Switch from Lawns to Food.

My place is the place of guerrilla gardeners, I have found. On walking home from my bus stop one stay, I suddenly stopped at a yard, realizing what I was looking at. I have passed this front yard many, many times over the course of the summer. But now, in the month of growing things coming to harvest, I am cognizant of looking, not at trimmed bushes, boring lawn, and flowers that behave themselves in neat rows, but VEGETABLES!

It is not lawful for people to grow vegetables in their front yard. If this garden-grower’s neighbors were to complain, they could be made to dig their vegetables up. But I can see that the people here have taken great pains to keep the garden tidy. They have added certain aspects that make the produce attractive, not just utile. The sunflowers, for example, or the boundary hedges of lavender. Clever! The sole tomato plant occupies the middle of the lawn, its heavy red globes almost ornamental amongst the furred leaves. It could be mistaken for a hydrangea, or some such, if one doesn’t look too closely. Perhaps that is the idea. Clever!

Fly in the face of suburban mores, I say! Thumb your nose at being just another of those ticky-tacky boxes. Do you remember that old folk song – “Little Boxes” by Malvina Reynolds, back in the 1960’s?

Little boxes on the hillside, 

Little boxes made of ticky tacky,

Little boxes on the hillside, 

Little boxes all the same. 

There's a green one and a pink one  

And a blue one and a yellow one, 

And they're all made out of ticky tacky 

And they all look just the same.

And the people in the houses 

All went to the university, 

Where they were put in boxes 

And they came out all the same, 

And there's doctors and lawyers, 

And business executives, 

And they're all made out of ticky tacky 

And they all look just the same.

And they all play on the golf course 

And drink their martinis dry, 

And they all have pretty children 

And the children go to school, 

And the children go to summer camp 

And then to the university, 

Where they are put in boxes 

And they come out all the same.

And the boys go into business 

And marry and raise a family 

In boxes made of ticky tacky  

And they all look just the same. 

There's a green one and a pink one 

And a blue one and a yellow one, 

And they're all made out of ticky tacky 

And they all look just the same.

Clever!

Hums and Songs in the Wire

2014-08-27T00:12:00.000-07:00

“Power lines are great places to hang my clothes—especially since my closet is full of birds. I make love like I have wings and know how to fly.”

― Jarod Kintz, Love quotes for the ages. Specifically ages 18-81.

My place is a place of overhead power lines. When I was a child in England overhead power lines served the role of laundry lines. Wet laundry secured by wooden pegs on lines that looped from tenement to tenement. Probably dangerous, though there were never fires, nor electrocutions.

When we came to Canada, power lines were the relief, the differential in the prairie landscape that provided a reprieve in mile after mile of loneliness and barrenness, mile upon mile from horizon to horizon. The wires sang in unison with the grasshoppers and, in the winter, the power lines creaked and groaned with the weight of snow. Every spring in small town Canada, about the time of high school graduations, the power lines were bedecked with tied sneakers, urban legends of one sort or another, shoes swaying on power lines along with the vertical traffic lights. Sometimes the wind, ever constant, made both the sneakers and the traffic lights horizontal. Actually, in that kind of wind, horizontal traffic lights would have made more sense. I wonder if they have realized that yet.

Here, in my place, power lines tangle with trees. They dance with the wind and threaten power outages. Because of the lost streams running under my neighborhood, underground lines are not an option. But that doesn’t upset me. Overhead power lines provide me with a degree of nostalgia. Memories of a childhood in England, and growing up with Prairie winds.

Because of the wind, or heavy rains, or the lines tangling with tree branches, our power is always at risk. But I feel we should always be at the mercy of nature. It keeps us humble. Spiders love the power lines as a base for building the most amazing of spider webs that routinely drape across my face in the morning as I go to the car. That’s cool. But I think, too, that the wires above me, serve to underline and emphasize the sky, like the emphatic line or two that we excise under an important word.

Mountains to Mole Hills

2014-08-25T23:30:00.000-07:00

“Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out going to the mountains is going home; that wilderness is a necessity...”

― John Muir

My place is a place of mountains that still hold onto their skirts of green, their mantles of fir and pine – but only just so. But a very short distance away, in a nearby place, the mountains, with their tenacious stone and gripping tree roots, no longer withstand the larger strength of development.

I stopped on the way to work this morning at a Starbucks in a village between my own small town and my work atop a mountain. When I came out, coffee steaming in hand, and juggling car keys, I looked up to the sound of a crow creaking softly and sorrowfully like an old farm gate sighing in the wind.

The light was still soft and hazy on the mountains on the other side of the sound, the tree line indistinct and velutinous. I lost my breath in a shocked gasp. Because not so very long ago, the green on the mountainsides was thick and impenetrable. The mountains wrapped around this little village like a fortress. They seemed inviolable – holy.

Now I noted houses built in clear-cuts, right of ways cleared for power lines. Development is creeping up the sides of the mountains like flood water up the side of a levee. Creeping up to where the bears are, the elk and the deer. Taking from them the only homes they have.

Dr. Jacques Diouf, an environmentalist, calls mountains the ‘water towers of the world”. According to him, one of every two people on the planet, every day, quenches their thirst with water that originates from mountains. Don’t even those people in those new, over-large, fancy houses need the water that the mountain creates? But as strong as we think mountains are, they are also fragile. Geologically, mountains are dynamic, not static. Disruption like these houses I see up on the slope, change habitat. As humans move in, life is wrung out.

I took my over-civilized (and over-priced) cup of coffee to my over-civilized car and took one last look at the mountains emerging out of the early morning haze. What happens to the creatures who live there, I wondered, when there is no more ‘up’ to go to? When we have made of the mountain, a mole hill?

A Disguising of Birds

2014-08-24T23:50:00.000-07:00

“In order to see birds it is necessary to become a part of the silence.”

- Robert Lynd

“What is more cheerful, now, in the fall of the year, than an open-wood-fire? Do you hear those little chirps and twitters coming out of that piece of apple-wood? Those are the ghosts of the robins and blue-birds that sang upon the bough when it was in blossom last Spring. In Summer whole flocks of them come fluttering about the fruit-trees under the window: so I have singing birds all the year round.”

- Thomas Bailey Aldrich

My place provides me with a plethora of birds. And throughout the year, I collect feathers on my walks. Or my husband brings me gifts of feathers that he and the dog have discovered on their walks. The feathers live in a pile of colour on a table in my studio. The feathers are like messages left in secret places where I am meant to stumble upon them.

In the spring downy woodpeckers and flickers hammer their silly heads on our chimney, making a sound that reverberates throughout the house for all the world like it is coming down about our ears. A group of flickers is called a ‘guttering’. Appropriate, since the metal gutters are also an attraction to them. This year they graced us with a brood of four to five awkward, raucous, flapping chicks. A tall, dead tree in the very back has become the site of tutoring that, next year, will progress to the chimney.

In the summer great flocks of tiny bush tits descend habitually on a bush in our front yard, that we have never been able to identify. The bush has a strange, alien habit (but that’s a story for another time). The bush tits are so very tiny, like little fairy birds. They twitter constantly as they swarm like bees over the bush. The twittering sounds like baby breaths through tiny chimes. I’ve come across, once or twice, their strange hanging nests made of moss and spider webs. What else but a fairy-blessed creature would make nests out of spider webs.

Nightly, in numbers more copious than the bush tits, crows crowd in the evening skies in waves and waves of discordant cacophony. They are going to trees to roost for the night, cuddled bum to beak along branches and briar. They build incredibly messy nests and chase the song birds from the neighborhood, jealous of their melodic voices compared to their own hoarse and jangling racket. But I love crows. I admire their temerity.

Now is the time of year when the Canada geese change their pattern. Throughout the summer we rarely hear them, but now that it is approaching autumn, they are flying over our roof – so low you can see their webbed, black feet tucked up under their bodies. My place is on the flight path between the river and the train yard. Now that the food is getting scarcer at the river, they fly over us early in the morning to feast on the grain at the train yard throughout the day. In the evening they fly back the other direction to sleep on the shores of the river. They fly in separate families, undulations one after another. I have come to hear that each family has a different honking sound, much like families of whales in the sea.

But, ultimately, my place graces me with the sweetest of birds – the mourning dove. It’s gentle call of cooooOOOOO-woo-woo-woo greets me in the quiet of the morning and calls softly in the night. It is like a solemn hymn. I found several of their nests fallen to the ground this summer. They are the flimsiest and most delicate nests I have seen, shallow, soft bowls made of pine needles and grass stems. Even more delicate than that of the bush tit. A group of mourning doves is called a dule – which means pitying. Perhaps I love them best because pity, though sorrowful, is also merciful. We could all do with more mercy in our lives.

Cups of Clouds

2014-08-24T00:39:00.000-07:00

"I waited in an unpretentious café at the corner of Dean Street and Old Compton Street called Torinos, which had been run for fourteen years by Mr and Mrs Minella from Italy and their son. It was pleasantly old-fashioned with tall, arched windows... It had wrought iron tables with marble tops, cups of proper coffee... you could talk for hours over a small cup of coffee and the Minellas did not mind. They were so anxious to keep their customers happy they kept their prices low and were rash enough to allow credit... The goodwill was reciprocated and the tables were usually crowded. There were dark Italians huddled in earnest discussions, suddenly bursting into furious argument... and several pale young artists and poets searching half-heartedly for jobs..."  - Daniel Farson “Soho in the Fifites”, 1987.

Strangely enough, the first character in Fried Green Tomatoes was the café, and the town. I think a place can be as much a character in a novel as the people.

- Fannie Flagg

My place includes a café where we sometimes go for cappuccinos and people watching. They welcome dogs, as evidenced by the many dogs lounging around the outside tables or tied to various structures as their owners make their coffee orders. Large metal water dishes provide refreshment for canine visitors and, on hot days, the water is spiked with cubes of ice. Dog cookies are free and plentiful.

This is one of the few coffee cafes that actually knows what a ‘dry’ cappuccino means, which is one of the many reasons we frequent it. One of the barristas is so excited when we show up, she says we make her day. Why? Because of the fact that we order dry cappuccinos.

“I get to create clouds”, she enthuses. “You let me make clouds for you!”

And, indeed, the cappuccinos are works of art, airy clouds virtually being kept in the cup by a mere spoon. Remove it and the froth would rise to the sky and take its place amongst the real cumulous, and cirrus, and mare's tails.

They let you sit forever. You can write, or muse, or people-watch. You can watch the curmudgeon Asian barrista draw incredible flowers, and trees, and fleur-de-lis on the top of lattes, a cynic with the heart of an artist. Or smell the fresh-baked creations of a chef-artist that understands the virtuosity of a truly poetic blueberry muffin.

A neighborhood café, a good café that authentically reflects its community, tends to be a centre of music, art, ideas – the place where people come together and share stories. We’ve started up conversations with people about their precocious toddlers, or their old, but lovable dogs, or whether their bike is Italian or American. Cyclists come to this café on the weekends, propping $3,000-dollar bikes against the hydrangeas. Mom n’ Babe groups on weekdays – looking for all the world like troupes of baboons as their babies cling to their backs, or fronts, or loll in their designer carriages.

We come to this particular café, in my place, for a lot of reasons. People-watching. Dog-watching. Narrative voyeurism. But mostly I come to this café because I love sipping mouthfuls of full-bodied, slightly bitter coffee through cumulous clouds.

Old Car and Wet Dog

2014-08-22T19:06:00.001-07:00

I also tend to like cars that need me. To me, cars are like old screen doors. I know that if I jiggle the latch and move it this way, it will open for me and no one else. And that's the kind of cars I like. So I'm the worst possible kind of consumer to do a test on. I like idiosyncratic things. . . . .

Jay Leno, Popular Mechanics, Feb. 2000

Cars are like rolling diaries, metal and plastic and paint tableaux of the last ten years of their drivers' lives ... every dent, every drooping slice of chrome, has a story behind it.

Jim Atkinson, Texas Monthly, "Heaven on Wheels," Sep. 1984

At times, the only way to get to certain parts of my place is by car. Rikki Rondo fulfills that role for me. Old, not exactly beautiful, and funky. Funky not just in looks but also in smell, as Rikki has been used to haul everything from garden manure to (at one time, and all at once) six dogs. Some smells never go away. Even now, with only one dog, the almost permanent nose prints on the windows make me feel that I am driving in a perpetual fog, coupled with the fog of the miasma created by wet dog (rain or lake, it doesn’t matter).

I remember when we bought the car. The dealer went on and on about that feature or another. Eight cup holders! Really. Who actually uses eight cup holders? The DVD player built into the ceiling of the car. We didn’t want a DVD player. It came as a standard feature. What we were concerned about was whether we could fit more than one giant sized dog crate in the back for those times we went sheep-herding, or to agility, or tracking. The dealer was rather nonplussed when we produced measuring tapes and measured the dimensions of the cargo space, having armed ourselves already with the dimensions of the dog crates. But it has a DVD player, and eight cup holders, he offered again. And it’s shiny.

We did end up buying Rikki Rondo. But almost solely because it had spaciousness in the cargo area. Now with less to haul, I would still not part with it for a smaller car. It has grown comfortable, like an old pair of slippers, warm and familiar. It has earned my trust, I have faith that it will not fail me on dark, rainy streets in the middle of nowhere. I have grown used to its (funky) smell, to the tricky positioning of the seat each time the shorter me drives it after my husband has. It has earned the role of being another sort of ‘place’ in my life, carrying me to other places of discovery.

Commuter Trains

2014-08-21T23:40:00.000-07:00

“[...] its small squares of fast-passing light, the early evening windows of the lives of hundreds of others.”

― Ali Smith, The Whole Story and Other Stories

Yesterday evening I rode on the commuter train out to meet my husband to watch a folk band at a local ale house. The train returning from the ‘big city’ goes through farm country and across a wide working river. At each stop people in business suits and carrying briefcases disembarked and rushed to waiting cars, and home for the night. This is an element of my place. My place is not a place where a lot of people can find work. They need to commute to the ‘big city’ to do so. And every evening they return from the big city to the small towns, including mine, from whence they have come.

It reminded me of when I was in middle school. On occasion (very often occasions) I would play hooky in the afternoon from school, not returning after having being home for lunch. My mother did not insist on my returning to school as she was lonely and loved the company, to watch the matinee movie – always at 1:00. The movies were almost all black and white. If they were not Westerns, then they were of an ilk that included scenes where husbands were seen off every morning, and collected every evening, from the commuter train. This was not a culture of which I was at all aware, until here, in my place, the commuter train.

The culture of the commuter train is somewhat like a microcosm of society. With the prevalence of digital devices, there can be a whole car-load of people that do not interact with each other at all, but instead with their various i-this and i-that. But, conversely there is also the reverse, as described by John Clammer,, a professor, in Train Culture: the Sociology of Tracks. He speaks of how the same people who routinely catch commuter trains tend to form interactions, but that these relationships dissolve when the train reaches its terminal and the crowd swarms off. He says that some of these interactions lead to long-term social relationships with others, including chess playing, But it is all ephemeral. Society is ephemeral.

I am not a regular train commuter. This instance was simply an efficient means to get from point A to point B with no car. Though I enjoyed watching the sociology of trains that was going on around me for a time, I soon turned to the scenery as it rushed past the windows. The commuter train is simply an aspect of my place, but one that does not fit well with the ‘sense’ of my place, whereas the passing scenery did. There are rules to train-riding and relationships. My relationship with the land that passed me has no parameters.

My place from a train window:

A Place of Wild

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How many of us sometimes feel that we are scratching at the walls of this life, seeking to find our way into a wider space beyond? That our mild, polite existence sometimes seems to crush the breath out of us? – source unknown

My place is not a place of perfect lawns. Granted, there are a few houses in the neighborhood that sport weedless front lawns and, based on how much of the yard the house takes up, no backyard to speak of. But as ‘perfect’ and nondescript as the lawn is, one never sees these people out on it. That says something, I think. Most yards here are just a little messy, a little unkempt, making room for old, original-forest trees, for the marshy, boggy bits because of the underground streams; for the trumpet vine and vicious blackberry vines, the wild geranium and buttercups that are all just a little more obstinate than we are.

Though my place is changing, and in ways I am not wholly comfortable with, evidenced by more and more of those perfect lawns, I have hope. That hope is the access lane at the end of our back ‘forty’. A space of about 30 feet that separates our property from that of the people on the next street over. The ironic thing is that it is in no way accessible to the city – or to anyone else. It is a place of wild that runs the length of our road and has become a wildlife corridor. It is overgrown with scrub and brush and ‘weed’ trees. It is the highway of skunks, and raccoons, and coyotes, the occasional deer, rats, squirrels, owls and hawks, and last year a bear (who visited – and destroyed – our birdfeeders). At night, the stars in the sky above are matched by glowing green and red ‘stars’ below.

My hope is that it is a place of re-wilding. A general definition of rewilding is: to return to a more natural or wild state; the process of undoing domestication. A more intense definition by Peter Michael Bauer, an artist, author, and teacher is:

“to foster and maintain a sustainable way of life through hunter-gatherer-gardener social and economical systems; including, but not limited to, the encouragement of social, physical, spiritual, mental and environmental biodiversity and the prevention and undoing of social, physical, spiritual, mental and environmental domestication and enslavement”.

To me, Re-wilding is about connectivity. The animals and plants re-establishing in places that had originally disrupted them, and our connectivity with that nature and ethos that occurs.

In addition, my neighborhood takes the sign in my front yard seriously – and doesn’t complain about the dandelions.

Lost Streams

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I came where the river

Ran over stones;

My ears knew

An early joy.

And all the waters

Of all the streams

Sang in my veins

That summer day. - Theodore Roethke, The Waking, 1948

My place was carved out of a forest and built on top of five fingers of streams that flow beneath our streets. They are called ‘lost’ streams. I recently came across an environmental report of my place, that includes areas quite a ways out into the lower valley, that has categorized streams as either wild, threatened, endangered, or lost.

There are hundreds of streams in my place. I suppose being at the middlemost area of three large rivers, I should not be surprised. The ones that are lost are those that have been built or paved over but still continue to flow in the subterranean depths beneath neighborhoods. In the early spring and late autumn, the time of heavy rains, several yards, including mine, flood. Being on such a high water table, the rainwater has nowhere to go as the streams are already carrying rainwater from their sources before they dip under the streets. The streams bubble up in the yards, reminding us of a landscape eclipsed by development. The streams remember.

There is an anonymous dedication of which I have heard, which breaks my heart:

“listen; the buried stream gurgles its longing to return to daylight and moonlight to nourish ducks, bracken, ferns, salmonberry and you”

It makes me deeply sad to think of my lost streams, like Peter Pan’s lost boys looking for a mother, longing for sunlight and moonlight. I imagine they yearn to be wild.

The photos are of streams in the area, at a point before they disappear under the streets.