If I have anything longer than a short sentence to word-process, I avoid the iPad with its stubborn insistense on replacing words I actually meant to type or its inventive volunteerism about what I should type next.  (My mom would have dubbed it a “bossy little toot.”)   That and its absence of a decentkeyboard.  Yes, Dad, you were right that learning QWERTY was a skill everyone should have (he didn’t) and I am almost ready to forgive you for signing me up for typing summer school in Grade 10 even though I was totally exempt and should have had the whole damned summer off.   Oh well.  So here I am, touch-typing happily at the iMac, which is getting long in the tooth like its owner.  That means I am in the “studio.”

The previous owners (we are only the second owners in 90-odd years) would have called it something else, although we are not sure what.  It had all the characteristics of a screened porch when we bought it but was missing one crucial component:  an exterior door and steps.  We are pretty sure that the room wasn’t a second thought because its walls blend seamlessly with the rest of the stone on the house.  Maybe a sleeping porch?  It had a latch on the porch side, so maybe a sleeping porch for grown-ups?

What ever it was, it is now the place I paint and write.  When possible.   This last few months have been so busy that my beloved studio has morphed into a storage unit — my brushes a jumble, piles of papers, and paints in no particular order.  I hate disorganization, so today is being devoted to sorting and cleaning and re-ordering all and sundry.  My palette is clean, brushes standing in straight lines like the little soldiers they can be, and the pigments all wearing their caps on straight.  The army is standing by.

​Yes, I get it.   It is somewhat grandiose to call a 7 by 10 space a “studio,’   let alone compare it to a battlefield.    I have tell my canvases to take a deep breath before I carry them in, and before anything new can be added, something equivalent in cubic area has had to vacate.  It’s full.

So here we are again, talking about “stuff.”   I do try not to bring home anything which is neither beautiful nor useful, but many old objects, having achieved both, have won a permanent home with us because they possess both form and function.   The studio, for example, houses dozens of art supplies, but my eye is calmed when paintbrushes sit in old scotch containers or paints reside in wooden art boxes, many of which were my mother’s.  Once in a while an old tube of her oil paint surfaces;  miraculously it  still spreads properly  if you can wrestle the screw top off.  There are not many of them because Mom moved immediately to acrylic when it hit the market, and shortly after abandoned that too for a new love —university courses in English and art --  never looking back, even when Dad grumbled that she was always writing essays.    A bust of her sits on the stone ledge beside me here  (when Theodore doesn't claim the space for bird-watching);   there she functions as the principal guardian angel, flanked by photos of her cherubs—my beloved scalliwag, the collie/cocker mix who ruled my life from grades 1 to 6, and the sainted Jewell.*

As the surfaces cleared today, so did my head. Like last year’s mourning dove on our window-ledge, who evicted her first brood before they had any desire to leave and immediately laid an egg, I too might be gestating a new painting or two now that the nest has been thoroughly refluffed!!


* (Jewell’s calm and friendly demeanour failed us only once.  I've written about the time dear Maureen had brought her gentle Aussie — Molson —over  for tea.  He seemed inexplicably stressed until we realized that Jewell was surreptitiously mau-mauing him with flashes of a white snarl.  After that, he wouldn’t even get out of the car in our driveway.  Well, Maureen’s current Aussie, Blu, who is much smaller than Molson, evened the score this week.   Mouths agape, Maureen and I watched Blu and Theodore go at one another in the kitchen.  It was the classic cartoonist’s dust-up until Theodore cried uncle.  For the rest of the visit, he cowered on my lap and refused to take his eyes off the little champ, whose lovely eyes gleamed with victory.    Sorry, but I have to say it:  Girls Rule!   

An old friend once remarked to me, after gazing around our living room, “You love your stuff, don’t you.”
A statement rather than a question.  There was no question.

Periodically, especially after I visit someone with a beautifully spare aesthetic, I ask myself what it is about “stuff” that matters to me.  The answer always seems to be connected with life lived, but not particularly my own.    When I gaze around Jon’s and my living room, I see it peopled with those who went ahead.  His maternal grandmother was an army matron who accompanied the troops into Europe to liberate France;  her uniform belt and dog tags rest on the old turning bookcase, close to the pocket watch of Jon’s paternal grandfather.  On another shelf sits the tin-type of my mother’s mother at age 8 and the embroidery Mom made for her half a century later.  My father’s crystal set sits close by, with an Inuit carving which was given to him by the dear friend who had built the basic radio with Dad when they were teens.  There, too, are a few of my paternal grandfather’s hand tools, and a beautiful little pot my grandmother threw.  On another bookcase is my great-great-grandfather’s leather-bound “Magistrate’s Guide to Upper Canada,” which the wrote in 1851, and a collection of Tennyson signed by the next Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and given to the family’s  governess, who happened to be my aunt's aunt.   Although he didn’t live long enough for me to hear him play it, Grandpa Keele’s violin hangs on the wall.

While there is quite a collection of stuff, it is not a “collection”.  I don’t actually collect anything, unless perhaps small wooden or lacquer boxes which are as useful as they are decorative, and Wardian cases to shelter greenery and provide sniffs of warm earth year-round.  Most of what is here would be worthless to anyone else, but for us it is most precious because it is specifically speaks to our roots..   

​My younger self must have whispered, "Stuff it!"

I have a bone to pick with Mr. Rogers. Not the lovely, quiet man who spoke gently to children. The Mr. Rogers who sorts my mail.

Christmas was the first signal that our relationship was faltering. Friends contacted me from various Canadian cities to complain that there were no letters from us and they had it on good authority that mutual friends had received theirs. Odd. I re-sent a number and put it down to Christmas mail. Then I began to realize that emails sent to me (Jon being apparently on good terms with Mr. R) would suddenly surface days late but in their correct date order. Pretty easy to miss those among the fifty or so which arrive daily. (Note to self: in your next life, join fewer than five active art groups). The coup de grace was an important email which I sent to six friends this month and which only three received. Not one of the missing missives ever bounced back or showed up in junk mail.

Mr. R and I had previously enjoyed a meaningful and balanced give-and-take. I gave him money and he took care of correspondence. Now, not so much. As a female, I do of course blame myself but cannot pinpoint what I did to offend him. While I admit that correspondence roulette is pretty exciting, I am more of a checkers-personality-type so I worry.

Why do you care? Only if you expect an invitation to the opening of the big show which opens on July 4 in Toronto at the Etobicoke Assembly Hall Gallery. I don’t yet have the flyer but expect to send e-vites in about a week. So…in case yours is misdirected to some digital purgatory in which to languish or is simply killing time to be delivered on the 5th, I am inviting you here. All I can hope is that Weebly, my kind webhost, doesn't know you-know-who.

When Jon and I were walking Theodore yesterday I happened to mention that my last blog was titled “The Lady and the Tramp.” Jon does not read my blog — probably a healthy decision - and he was visibly startled, blurting “I’m not the tramp, am I?” "No, of course not," I replied. "It’s about Jewell and Theodore.”

But it did get me thinking.

Jon may not be homeless but he does have an inordinate love of adventure. He cycles daily, whenever possible finding a new route to explore. When he doesn’t arrive home on time, I find that a text which begins with “Where are you?” and concludes with “Shall I start selling off your gear?” does the trick. That’s going to be some garage sale when the time comes. In the meantime he scares the living daylights out of me, especially when he’s cycling in rush hour. Ironically, it was on a Sunday when he wiped out, having been cut off by a driver who made an unsignaled turn right in front of him and who later admitted to not having noticed him. I’m pretty sure Jon had left his invisibility cloak at home that day. So I breathe easier when Theodore hears the bike on our pea gravel driveway and leaps off the couch to greet our vagabond with high-pitched yelps of unalloyed joy.

Then there are the canoe trips. Jon used to do solo wilderness trips. He let me come on one (I figured we might as well die together). Unfortunately that was the year that the Attawapiscat washed out after an enormous storm and all the campsites were under water. I wasn’t doing much better than they were. By Day 3 it became clear that I was the albatross around Jon’s neck. Miraculously, we were able to radio for help; apparently I embraced the bush pilot in relief and Jon drove me to my mom’s in Winnipeg. I tried to chain him to a telepole in the basement but he outwitted me and went back to do the Albany alone. It didn’t help my nervous system that while at Mom’s I happened across a tiny article in the paper about a paddler who has just been found circulating in an Attawapiscat souse-hole that same week.


Another year (and another solo trip): Ian, our dentist, made the mistake of making conversation and enquiring about Jon. Very little dental work ensued. Yet another summer found me sniffling in a stairwell at Canadore College, where I was supposed to be distracted by a painting course now. And so it went. Mercifully, my canoe bum now trips with five other guys and I sleep like a baby.

Please don’t get me started on fishing in high water. Jon has the brains to wear a belt on his waders so they can’t fill up and drown him if he trips but still…. When it did happen, the belt worked and my heroic camera sacrificed itself. (Look on the bright side if humanly possible.)

Do you remember “Dress for success”? Yes, there is such a thing as Tramp Style. Post-retirement Jon’s uniform is pure Mark’s — cargo pants for all seasons and canvas shirts in (thank heavens) a variety of colours, long sleeves for cool weather and short sleeves for hot; note what he's wearing in this painting which is at least ten years old. He might be wearing that shirt as I write this. He is wed to them, even those which bear the battle scars of trips and projects long forgotten. I have to smuggle the most egregious oldies out under coffee grounds. I had tried turning them into painting rags but they turned out to be too identifiable. I suspect him of doing the same with his dress clothes.

But thanks, Darling, for asking the question. You are, as always, an inspiration!
​