By now you have given up asking, “Do you still paint?”  

As a matter of fact, I do, though in tiny time slots — half an hour here, ten minutes there. The group’s annual show is approaching and that means taking advantage of a room of my own, my studio.  Coincidentally I am reading Virginia Woolf’s book on same.  Her writing fills me with admiration.  Its apparent stream-of-conscious meandering gradually reveals itself to be a cogent and persuasive treatise supporting the need for women to have basic rights such  the ability to have her own money, to have help with child care, and to receive fair legal and domestic treatment in the matter of family resources.  Woolf’s argumentation (her “little fish”) is artfully disguised as preparation for a talk she has agreed to do about women’s literature  and a consequent research visit to Oxbridge.  Before long, she has convinced the reader that it is a miracle that women have any literary productivity at all.

So, getting back to my own wee room of my own where I unsuccessfully go to hide, there are canvases stacked willy-nilly.  There are two large landscapes.  One is another paddler’s view of a magnificent tree framed by a cumulus cloud, and the other  belongs to the Above The Credit series, one of my favourite photos, which I have been trying for years to paint, always chickening out.  Well, desperate times call for desperate measures, so  now the painting of an overcast January day with pewter water and hoarfrost sits next to its diametrical opposite — sunshine, blue sky, and a canoe on the river.  I happen to love both seasons and I hope you can tell.

The other two large works  #2 and #3 of the “Besties” series — a child with a beloved pet.  I have strong feelings about the subject, partly because my best friend was my dog.  We were inseparable and gaze into one another’s eyes in this photo.   You can  see his muzzle right below my chin. 

He was a VERY bad boy.  I’m generally no fan of bad boys but for I have made a few four-legged exceptions    Yes, Theodore, I'm talking about you.

Hope to see you at the annual art show this weekend.  Bring a dog biscuit.  Or if you beg, I'll give you one.

I wish I could report happy news about the dozens of native herbaceous plants I have planted.  Unfortunately, the local drought is 18 weeks in.  Yes, I can spot-water, but  apparently still have my gift for alternating between scorching or drowning the tiny green things.  After watching our favourite little bunny polish off a small fortune one evening, it was BUY -  either a shotgun or cloches.  The echinacea which had three leaves when I bought it on June 18th sacrificed all three in early July to Peter R.;  by dint of hard work on both our parts, it now has three leaves once more.  If the weather holds, it will  bloom for Christmas.  Transparent cloches (thank-you Dollarama) do lend a quaint air to the garden, which now appears to be undergoing a medieval treatment for plague.

Still, the battle, I thought, was won.  But someone was tall enough to clip off all of the Liatris flower stems.  But who?  Not squirrels or rabbits.  

Then I caught a glimpse of a groundhog loping along our neighbours’ pool.  She looked happy and plump.

All in all, in and around our home all  hope of regular living has withered away.  The dining room continues to host a large pen which summons visions of a medieval castle battlement for short people. Toys abound.  I’ve lost count of the number of times we have fished her orange dental ball (you read that correctly) out from under the armoire while Piper tapped her paw.  We are all dealing with puppy gates on every egress or ingress.  They are solid-looking but actually light plastic and we are dead if she ever figures that out.  

To further complicate footwork, our elaborate Fujitsu air conditioner/heat pump multi-system lost all three of its little minds at the first of the month;  imagine Siamese triplets who can’t or won’t talk to one another.  One has hogged all of the coolant and runs at 50 while the other two defiantly blow variations of warm air.  There is an error code but after we waited three weeks to have a specialist come and fix said code, he had no inkling of what to do, mumbled an apology, and scuttled out.  So now six tower fans grace the doors, bravely trying to circulate the cold air from the front bedroom.  (We will order a new system in the fall.  It won't be a Fujitsu.)

I pity the burglar who tries to negotiate our maze in the dark.  

Piper grows more…well, more, every day;  She is almost as big as Theodore, weighing in at 20 pounds to his 24.  We think her ears account for most of that.

July's small acts of defiant survival would include Jon’s getting back to cycling and my writing this and finally finishing and wiring five paintings.  There’s another which hasn’t gotten any further than my mind, but at least my visual brain is pregnant.  See you at the end of August.   

I just noticed that the word “dispatches” has “patches” in it.  How prophetic.  Three of us are patchy;  Piper had a tick.  Dealt with.  Theodore sported a carbuncle on his nose.  No idea why.  Fell off.  Dealt with.  I won the prize:  something bit me but checking the mirror is long gone in this new puppy world;  I brushed it off and when the bite got itchy,I scratched.  It got itchier.  Scratched some more.  Finally someone took pity on me and asked, “Have you looked at the far side of your jaw???”  Oh dear, what the hell is that?  Two prescriptions in, it is receding from a large but lovely deep maroon (be content with this as the only reference to art you’re going to get).   I’m rather long in the tooth to be learning not to mindlessly scratch at something you can’t see but there you go.  What we do know is that Jon is the patch-carrier.

Moving along, did you know that her third month is a puppy’s prime socialization time?  Neither did we, so imagine our surprise to be instructed to invite a hundred people over to Meet Piper.  Well, at least one insane, pre-pandemic nut bar of a writer suggested that number.  We drew the line at 30-odd, all of whom came generously bearing gifts of the squeaky sort.  We can track the dogs by sound now.  

You might recall that, thanks to the Derecho, our beloved sugar maple committed suicide and as a corollary created a sunny garden and eating area for the first thirty feet of our back garden  Only when we contemplated inviting the fellow dog nuts to meet the little rat, as Theodore calls her, did we realize that we suddenly had a big problem:  virtually everybody we know sensibly prefers to sit in the shade.  Well, there isn’t any cover left in the back garden, only a solar roasting oven, formerly known as Patio. 
It eventually occurred to us that we have a front yard, which still has (too much) grass and is surrounded by tall trees, so we lugged the Adirondacks to the far front and plopped them in its darkest corner.  Alas, it too is blasted with sun mid-day.  When women visitors try politely but in vain to haul these behemoths back into the shade, it’s quite Monty Pythonesque.  I never really thought about nursing an active dislike of a chair but it turns out that it's a thing;  most people (women) harbour a burning hatred of heavy outdoor chairs.  I would probably hate Adirondack chairs too if I thought of them as seating, but there are far too many things to do in a large garden to sit down much so I unreservedly adore them for their gorgeous blue and their sculptural lines.  

Bottom line — please come to meet Piper, but expect to stand in the front garden or broil on the patio.  Maybe we’ll set up the sprinkler and take turns running through it.  Piper recommends it highly.

Most of our time alone at  home is spent while Jon trains the wee girl. We’ve dropped the pretence of my helping with this because I am inept.  Picking up the ball, as it were, Jon and Piper are both in with all six feet.   If she doesn’t receive an invitation to visit with Queen Elizabeth in a month or two, I shall be surprised.  The two old dogs (T and I) watch in wonder.  We’ve both brushed off our Come-and-Sits.    Theodore’s Stay is outstanding,  while I return the red ball quite reliably.  Piper starts calculus in September.

My cultural re-education is coming to an end.  I am now at peace with being #4 in our family.

So this morning Jon pointed to the bedroom floor and said — is that dribbled makeup?  Not unless you’re wearing it, I replied.  Said droplets revealed themselves to be peanut butter.   Which matched the abstract concoction on our duvet.  That in a peanutnut shell is the state of our nation.

When Piper arrived a week ago (It seems longer, much longer, both Theodore and I agree, while reminiscing about the wonderful life we used to have), everything has changed, changed utterly,  as Yeats would put it.    Whether either of us would characterize the new regime having a “terrible beauty” is debatable.

Come to think of it, she IS  both beautiful and terrible.  Dandelion soft fur, gorgeous eyes like locked lasers,  Skye terrier ears beginning to stand up, all good.  But terror squeezes my heart when I have to admit that she may be  smart.  I have made a point of never owning a pet or a machine that is smarter than I am;  sure,  I had to drop the “smart machine” element almost 37 years ago with our first Apple but I pathetically clung to safe harbour of the pet warning.   For example,  I know not to fall in love with a border collie.   But Skyes almost always anchor the bottom end of the canine IQ list.  We count on this, and Theodore has never disappointed us. 

Piper’s first night was a busy one, pulling out all the stops in an impressive repertoire  of yodels, coyote yips (in which she played all the parts in the opera), and a growly mumble which reminded me of Bijou, our macaw, when she was learning to talk.  Luckily, the delightful breeder modelled the appropriate response:  “SHUSH!!!  MAMA NEEDS HER SLEEP!” I can’t do the Russian accent or the low register or the appropriate volume, but I try.  Piper probably laughed herself back to sleep.

We even negotiated the  first weekend - Victoria Day — four days of which featured fireworks, some as close as two houses away.  for a moment, things looked to be in hand.  Had the derecho not zipped between our house and the garage…

In less than one endless minute my favourite tree, a sugar maple I planted 40 years ago, snapped 15 feet up.  It then toppled across the patio, where it had delivered welcome shade for many years, and laid itself across half of the roof, where it patiently waited for someone to remove it (think Pick-up Sticks).   My little green heart is broken, and about 500 square feet of my woodland native garden have been exposed and are now perishing in full sun.  The thirty-year old 12 foot rhodies are only memories.  

Bill, our wonderful forester, managed a dangerous removal while sparing the stone walls and the old doors and windows.  It took three skilled men and a convoy of equipment five full hours.  When the cleared roof was found to have no apparent punctures, we summoned up what energy we had to wave little flags and mumble hooray.   We are both a tad ditsy.  Jon the Magnificent takes the early morning shift; I have no such excuse except looking and feeling 95.  Managing the expectations of two dogs learning to happily co-habitate is tricky but coming along.

A dear friend described retirement as every evening’s being Friday night and every day a Saturday;  these days, every day is Monday.  That I found a fat tick on Piper was no surprise, of course.   

The longest week of our lives was rounded out nicely with an electrical fire in the kitchen microwave . Luckily, I was standing two feet away when two loud clunks were followed by billows of black smoke.  Again,  no real harm done, aside from the disappointment of losing a great top-of-the-line convention/microwave Panasonic  which was probably the youngest thing in the house if you don’t count Piper + paraphernalia.  

You have no doubt surmised that neither painting nor gardening are on the near horizon.    
Frankly, I don’t know how anybody survives a newborn anything.  Shout-out to all of my friends who have raised children.  I honestly didn’t know.  

So it’s still sprinter.  I had such hopes before Easter Monday when we awoke to snow cover.  Sure, it melted by the end of the day but the psychological damage was done.  
I started gardening in earnest in February, planting the native seeds I had collected, labelled, and cold stratified over the winter.  We are now seven weeks in.  Feeling expectant, I dreamed that the tiny pots were full of little green sprigs;  and indeed there was a bountiful harvest!   Unfortunately, my abilities lie in mycology.  
Back to the drawing board.  I continue to watch webinars on habitat gardening but they become increasingly bittersweet.  Exterminating the unfortunate toadstools didn’t help.    Next to nothing has replaced them except calla lilies because a corm is hard to screw up unless you plant them facing down.  My overwintered geraniums are blooming but again, not native.
It wouldn’t matter at all if the bioweb weren’t in dire straits.  The sheer magnitude of severe decline, not to mention full extinction, is terrifying.  Insects, of whom the vast majority are beneficial,  are now in scarce supply and you have to look only at similarly plummeting bird species to see one of the results. Our traditional properties are full of pretty but useless non-native species which support no natural life, turf grass - en ecological desert -  being the most egregious.   I will be gone before the full wave hits but it feels like a rotten inheritance to leave to other generations so habitat gardening and charitable support of environmental agencies like the Nature Conservancy of Canada are must-dos for every one of us who has a garden and/or some spare cash.

I do have some excellent news, however.  If you are lucky enough to live in Mississauga, a force of nature named Jeanne McRight  has spearheaded a new organization called Blooming Boulevards whose goal is to reclaim our boulevards for nature by planting species that insects and birds can rely on.  In three years they have established 200 of such gardens, all of them beautiful as well as ecstatically alive with pollinators.   Because our own property is full of old trees, my efforts lean towards  woodland habitats, but most people have full sun out front and the prairie species really shine.  I am envious as hell but too grateful to trees to complain much.  

As I write this, Jon is banding said trees to protect them from lymantra dispar dispar (aka gypsy moth). Last year almost every tree in our heavily wooded neighbourhood was stripped naked and left covered with buffy egg masses just waiting to finish the job this year.  Many years ago, that happened to us and since then we have driven to the States for Sticky Foot, hand-picked the caterpillars and used pheromone traps  - so successfully that last year we  saw only 8 caterpillars and lots of drowned love-sick males.  There was one egg mass this spring and it’s now defunct, an ex-egg-mass, an egg-mass that has gone to meet its maker.  

It IS possible to fight back.  Unfortunately  because so few residents did step up, the City has had to arrange for aerial spraying.  The wasted tax money is one thing:  the important part of the equation is that  the spray will kill all of  the moths and butterflies at the same time.  All because we may like living around trees but are too lazy to fight for them.

Again we are being called upon to expend some effort if we care  about this beautiful world we have inherited.   

Dragging herself determinedly back from the brink of despair, she said, “Wanta know who spent fifteen minutes in our front yard today?”  (We have four or five bird feeders going)  Thanks for asking.  Well, mainly couples - though not always together because there are eggs to incubate - we have  flickers, white-throated sparrows, cardinals, blue jays, gold-finches, chickadees, red-bellied woodpeckers, red-winged blackbirds, downy woodpeckers, hairy woodpeckers, and mourning doves.   Jon  says he not only heard but actually saw an oven  bird spouting TEAcher, TEAcher, TEAcher!! Wheeling above are the red-tailed hawks and the turkey  vultures.    We are expecting the orioles to arrive back shortly, and perhaps the wild turkey who roosted in a tree next door last year at a this time.  The brown headed cowbirds also made a brief appearance, although I pray they didn’t stay long enough to parasitize the resident nests.

Best of all, I am in the business of taming a chipmunk!  She wants to be called Sarah. 

Such happiness.  Such worry.  Such a life.

I’m into the home stretch.

The hoarfrost forest is pretty much in hand, I am reasonably satisfied with the composition and palette.  The whole painting is about developing a tension between the complex, dare-I-say lacey, land and the simple opacity of the river.  Now I am finding the white ice too flat, however;  it needs dimensionality  if I want to cast  it as a bridge between land and water.  
​
And there’s one large tree which insists on being given its due.

Thinking, thinking, thinking.   But the sun is about to come out.

Let’s start with that wise mantra:  location, location, location.

My studio is bombing that test as I write this on a lovely sunny day.

Had I been around in the 1920’s when our house was being built, I would rotated the foundation half a turn.  Well, aren’t we precious, you are thinking, but hear me out.  Remember that business about Parisian ateliers with northern exposures?  As a young reader, I always wondered what was so desirable about north light, which is cold and blue-ish.  I decided that north garretts must have been the cheapest and didn't think about it for half a century.  

Turns out that it’s not so much about wanting north light.  Instead, it's all about avoiding south light.

By now you’re guessing that my studio windows are of the southerly persuasion.  All seven of them.  Oh yes.  The result? A veritable deluge of full-spectrum daylight.  So now you are wondering why I would turn my nose up at great light.  Start by imagining a big area covered with fresh oil paint;  you can do this in the basement -- the only important stipulations are that you use oil so this undercoat is shiny.   Immediately set the canvas in front of a strong full-spectrum bulb.  Take a brush with another oil colour and begin painting.  What happens is that all you will see are the brushstrokes reflecting back.  The availability of colour vision has sailed.  

This situation reigns from November to April in my studio unless I am blessed by an overcast day.

Ironically, the reason I love oil paints above all others, like acrylic or gouache, is that same exquisite slowness to dry.*  I can work it for hours almost like finger-paint because it begs to be blended.  And I must admit that May to October make it easy:   once the canopy opens the room is shielded from direct light.  But when once again the leaves drop, I wait for cloud cover.   Christmas is the worst, of course, when the sun’s arc is lowest and reflected glare blinds me.  

So today I will find something else to do.  As the promise of spring whispers, I have begun to hear the siren call of my other passion:  the garden. The native seeds that I collected last year need to be started and surely some will survive this year!


*Speaking of which, the way a finished oil painting dries is worth mentioning.  It may have an ugly duckling stage when the finish is a bit patchy in terms of shine.  However, practise patience.  In about a year, it will have settled into a velvety glow.  Worth the wait.
​

As I painted today, I was privy to a conversation between my right and left hemispheres.


LB:  Well a nice mess you’ve gotten us into this time, Ollie!

RB:  It seemed like a good idea at the time….

LB:  Did it ever occur to you to take a more careful look at reference photos?????

RB:  Well, I’ve looked at it hundreds of times since 2010, when I took it…..

LB:  And what, may I be so bold to ask, did you conclude every bloody time?

RB  It looked like a lot of work.

LB:  And why was that, do you think, in your infinite wisdom??

RB  There is an awful lot going on when you fit it onto a 30 x 40 canvas…..

But I have always wanted to paint a white forest and that was the only picture I have even taken of it.  Besides, the river was so pretty in that winter colour.  I really love that colour, but boy, it was a stinker to mix.

LB:  Focus.  An awful lot of what, exactly?

RB  trees

LB:  And how many trees would you say??

RB:  a lot

LB:  JUST A LOT??????

RB:  Well, an awful lot.  But they are all dead now….

LB:  Wait — what are you yammering about?

RB:  Well, it was your fault.  Remember when we learned Forestry and you made me learn that only two trees were “even” — maples and ashes.  And a lot of these weren't shaped like maples.  Maples are happy and rounded. Ashes are all straight and pointy.  Y's on top of Y's on top of Y's....See?

And you told me how those bad greeny chewers have murdered them all.  I wanted to do something nice for them so they'd know I was sorry..  And they all look like brides in the photo....

LB:  It's called "hoarfrost" you idiot.

sullen silence

So what delight can I expect next:  a pyre of parrots?  a graveyard of  grackles?   a cemetery of sea turtles?????

RB:  Gosh, noooooo!!  Now do I have to worry about them too???

LB:  oh, right  We should do something.

​Neither moves.

​Wow.  Both lobes are streaming Beckett’s two tramps instead of Laurel and Hardy.    They don't normally agree on anything.   Scary, when you think about it.  

I don’t know about you, but over forty years of marriage, I have amassed a pretty damned impressive collection of unmatched socks.  My array fills a bin and is even sub-divided into ‘black wool socks,”  “black cotton socks,” and so on.  Such blind optimism has filled my life, I realize as I look back.

Well, today I broke.  Having commandeered the glass stove-top for the weekly match-up, I started with the usual enthusiasm until the first close-but-no-cigar winked at me seductively.  Sure, one was brown-black and the other leaned more to the blues but it suddenly struck me that no-one with life would even notice my socks, let alone care.  Together these babes would stay!

“Close enough!” was surprisingly liberating. 

With this epiphany came the understanding that Mom was a lifelong practitioner of knowing when to care.      Sure, it could go missing for lack of practise, like the time she was helping us paint the kitchen a lovely rich cream and it came to Jon’s attention that Mom was paying more attention to the conversation than to which which tray she dipped her roller into - sometimes high gloss, sometimes matte.  The splotchy and semi-reflective result was particularly striking at dusk.  But most of the time, it worked just fine and echoed her sunny nature.  Her paintings were happily loose.

Another inspirational woman in my life is my dear friend, Irene, who has claimed successfully since 1975 that her iron had gone missing in a move and it felt disloyal to invest in a new one.  

So at our next art show (which, by the way, has just been re-scheduled yet again - this time to late September), look for the painter with an orange sock, a green sock and a smile which needs ironing.  Assuming there’s just one of us.