My brain is so steeped in the strong brew of literature that fragments of lines and shreds of plots settle at the bottom of the teapot that is my head.  Today, when the usual late-August swarm of fruitflies arose from the peach set down briefly on the counter, Keats jumped out, becoming “Autumn, season of mists and mellow fruit-fly-ness.”  I think it’s an improvement, actually.

Far from its being a time of calm satisfaction with a harvested crop, fall is actually a source of trepidation for most people.  I think it is the sense of returning to work and all of the surprises that come with new people and new challenges.  It normally proves to be happily manageable, but the pace certainly pick up and you barely come up for air until the next summer.

So my heart goes out to all those who have come to know the triggers of impending autumn:

- of course, fruit flies
- the odd red leaf on a tree
- wild grapes ripening
- the thrum of cicadas
- school buses on trial runs
and the two worst  - ads for school supplies and conversations that begin with “Are you looking forward to getting back to it?”

Frankly, I think it should be illegal to stock, let alone advertise, Hilroy products until September.   And it goes without saying that the question rarely sparks joy, as they say.  Unless it is an honest question, coming from another in the same boat, a "morituri te salutamus," it is an impertinence and should be ignored with as much dignity as one can muster.

So, for those of you who, in early August, started counting down the days left, I send you both sympathy and empathy.  You are allowed to kvetch.  Everybody does a certain amount of worrying about change.  You will be fine.  And this too shall pass.  Time really does fly.  Think of those tiny black flies whose lifespan is as minute as they are.  Now they have a GOOD reason to mutter "carpe diem" as they hover over my ripening fruit.  Because I am now about to murder them.

I rather like spring raking, if only because it feels like scratching the back of an enormous slumbering bear.  I always assumed that emerging from hibernation must be a challenge and a post on this week’s weather channel proved it.  A live-cam feed shows such a bear, whose head alone protrudes from a large tree, struggling mightily to open his eyes but with little success.  The prospect of an affectionate back scratch would surely be just the thing to ease the transition.

But this weekend found the bear having succumbed to those heavy eyes!  Rain had turned to snow and while the land slumbered there was nothing to do but play on top of it.  Theodore was beside himself with glee, snowplowing, rolling,  shaking and galloping.  We broke trail through the maple forest and while Jon’s and my paths were reasonably straight,  Theodore’s wove left and right like that of a cheerful drunk.  Remember that our little guy’s legs are barely 6 inches (I’m being generous) — about the same depth as the snow on Saturday.    Sometimes he had to fall behind to chew off the snowballs building on his low undercarriage, only to reappear over a hill in a frenzy of catch-up haste.

It took me about twenty minutes to carefully tease off the ten pounds of iceballs on Theodore’s nether regions.   To tell you the truth we were both pretty nervous, given the delicate location.  But it did prove that Theodore may not be as dim as we had feared, because on Day 2 he contentedly trotted behind us like a  prince, deigning to let our feet do the road work and keeping his own powder dry, so to speak.   

Skye terriers may not be built for snowy cross-country hikes but their excess of personality more than compensates for a body designed by a fractious committee.  When we finish laughing, Jon and I remind ourselves at times like this that our pack will always be enriched by a wee lassie like Jewell or a wee laddie like Theodore.  Skye terriers are literally a vanishing breed, like bears in suburban forests.

Both are irreplacable.

Years ago, we spent an unforgettable six months, November to April, on Salt Spring Island, B.C.  Of course, we did everything backward as usual.  We Ontarians headed to the Coast for its mild winter only to find that most islanders had headed to the Baja to avoid that self-same winter.  To add insult to injury we brought the snowstorm of the century with us.  

True islanders are loath to admit that such an event is even possible.  Several weeks after the event,   Jon and I were hailed by a couple of men on the shore we were paddling past.  Determining we were from Ontario, they assumed we had just arrived and donned the classic cloak of climate superiority which begins with the boast that it doesn’t even snow on SSI.  Nice try.  Completely snowed in for four days, we had had nothing but pizza ingredients for Christmas dinner;  that is not something easily forgotten.  Still,  because Jon had packed our cross-country skis (and his canoe, his bike, his rods and reels, and all peripheral equipment, a collection which undermined his complaint that my painting kit took up too much room), we did get to ski, if only to buy eggs.  So I guess it was worth travelling across Canada with newspaper on my lap because the only place left to put Bijou, our macaw, was on a perch hanging from the passenger visor.    She loved the trip, delivering an enthusiastic ‘Hi!” to every car we passed.  I should get danger pay.


Undeterred, the men who tried to mislead us about the recent weather hastened to tell us about a regular feature on a Victoria radio station.   This gambit involved picking a name at random from the Toronto phone book, dialing the number and asking about the weather that day.  They called it “Taunt a Torontonian.” Cold. Very cold. My own dear Uncle David never failed to write us in Winnipeg every January,  always managing to mention (ever so casually) that the bloody daffodils were in bloom.  This particular winter, thankfully, weather did settle back into its temperate, if overcast,  norms and we had many days of hiking every trail we could find.  Jon also took the car to go fishing and if I wasn’t painting, I would walk for miles up and down North End Road.  There was little traffic and few houses so I could botanize or muse to my heart’s content.  Occasionally a black-tailed deer and I would meet for a shy hello, but there was always time to think.  This painting was inspired by a brief interlude of sunshine.  I was so surprised that I took a picture.

I was reminded of these wonderful solitary walks this week when I finally got into the second of the two books on the subject of hiking which Scott, my brother, had given me.   It references Thoreau, Rimbaud, Nietzsche,  and Kant, to name a few famous walkers.  All four were dedicated to the outdoors,  unpopulated spaces and that most precious of commodities, time to think. I particularly liked the chapter on silence:

What is called "silence" in walking is, in the first place, the abolishment of chatter, of that permanent noise that blanks and fogs everything, invading the vast prairies of our consciousness like couch-grass.  Chatter deafens:  it turns everything into nonsense, intoxicates you, makes you lose your head.  It is always there on al sides, overflowing, running everywhere, in all directions.  

I wouldn't begin to put myself in the company of those famous thinkers, except to say that most of my paintings and these blogs are begun in my head, gestated to the silent rhythms of walking or meditating; to some extent they write or paint themselves when I eventually get down to work.   If there is a moral to this, it is nothing more than an encouragement to take good care of shank's pony.     Start early if you can, the goal being not to outlive your feet!  Wearing spike heels for thirty years was not a brilliant long-term decision on my part;  my feet have eventually and grudgingly forgiven me, but only after I promised them a pampered future filled with orthopaedic shoes and pricey orthotics.  

It would have been a heck of a lot cheaper to get it right from the beginning.  

​I am a woman and I could change.  Because I had to.  I guess.

​ 

All I can think about is the heat. Every year about this time, a run of scorchers sets me to wondering why southern Ontario was even settled. I certainly cannot imagine a woman saying "Look, sweetheart -- let's settle here and we will never need to build a sauna!"   I once had the opportunity to re-educate a young man who was waxing eloquent about the searing temperatures. It seems he didn’t realize that anyone might feel differently and it fell to me to enlighten him. I gently explained that at a certain age, a woman’s thermostat breaks and never really functions properly again; I went on to stress that homicidal tendencies ensue. There was a long pause while he digested this and then he said, “That so explains my mother.”

I had such plans for today — an appointment, lunch with an old friend, some casual shopping for food, and finally painting! Then I walked out into the wall of heat and started to unravel like Macbeth’s sleep patterns. For heaven’s sake — he murdered the king; all I did walk to the car. By the time I got home all possibie creativity had melted and run.

So let’s talk about the relationship between painting and climate. It is well accepted that the Mistral or Witches’ Wind contributed to the accelleration of van Gogh’s mental illness to the point where his cutting off an ear must have felt inevitable. Madness aside, simple physical factors such as temperature and humidity have powerful effects on the painting process. Because my oil paintings are comprised of multiple transparent layers, I depend on low humidity as a prerequisite to proceeding in any kind of timely manner. Each layer has to be bone dry before the next can be applied. My tentative finger test today proved that nothing has dried since yesterday. The surface remains syrupy and there is no point in continuing for the immediate future. Oil painting promotes patience, whether you want it or not.

This should be motivation to dig out my acrylics. Unfortunately, they dry too fast. (I am beginning to sound like Goldilocks, small girl of with high porridge standards.) The few acrylic paintings that I have been remotely satisfied with began and ended in days of pouring rain. Because the humidity level must have been close to 100%, I could work the pigments for long enough to coax them into submission.

There. It's both hot and humid, and I have just talked myself into giving my acrylics another crack. If life gives you lemons, paint one.

I’ve been meaning to paint this scene for a years.  The sight of laundry on a line has always seemed to me a cheery subject,.   This is, of course, pure sentimentality as I have rarely had either the opportunity or the necessity to dry our clothes outside.  But let me tell you about my mother and her own mother.

My grandmother would have begun her married life as a soon-to-be prodigious washer of clothes with a large copper boiler like the one I use decoratively in the garden.  Water would first have had to be hauled by the boys from the pump and then heated on top of of the wood stove with lye soap.  Once added to the boiling water, the clothes would have been stirred with a stick and sometimes scrubbed against a washboard, before being rinsed with clean water - cue more hauling and more heating.   The toughest work, though,  must have been the hand-wringing and I am sure that the advent of wringer washers would have been a blessing; I hope that she had one in her last years.  

My mother’s clothes-washing days would have begun with just such a washer in our basement on Kingsway.  I can vaguely remember the machine, probably because the sight of it was always accompanied by dire warnings to keep my fingers and hair away from the rollers.  I loved to feed clothes into it even though I was properly terrified of finding a large flat hand coming through on the other side.  Mom hovered a lot.  For that and many other reasons it was a happy day for her when she got her first (and only) automatic washer - an Eaton's Viking.  It was still working when she moved into a seniors’ home fifty years later.  The concept of “planned obsolescence” hadn’t been invented yet.

An automatic dryer accompanied Mom’s new washer even though the backyard boasted a modern new square clothes line set-up which obediently whirled when I twisted it.  Frankly, I preferred the old-fashioned long line which could be hauled in and out but I suspect my mother was still getting over the early days of hanging diapers on the line in 50 below weather and needed no reminders of that time in her life.  She said that the wash, which had solidified, stiffened and sublimated in the cold, was a challenge to fold.  She may have mentioned raw red hands too but I'm suspect I wasn't half as sympathetic as I should have been.  If memory serves, the dryer got constant use in cold weather;  when it came to laundry, Mom was no martyr.

Even so, she still hung the clothes outside in the summer. Do you remember the wonderful smell of line-dried clean clothing?  I still love it, but a Southern Ontario summer quickly put paid to that little pleasure.  I grew up in dry prairie air which dried everything quickly and efficiently.  Imagine my surprise the first time I went to  bring in the clothes here and found them limp instead of crisp almost a day later.  It baffled me, who had no concept of humidity beyond its scientific description.  Using a curling iron on my straight hair in this wet air had much the same result.  I finally gave in, bowing to the necessity of ponytail clips and a clothes dryer.

So I hope you will forgive the hypocrisy of my painting a clothesline blowing smartly in the wind.  Put it down to genetic memory (which is receiving a lot of press this year).  Someone else might channel vestiges of ancestral abilities.  I get laundry.

And suddenly - KA-BOOM - it finally IS spring!! The poem by e.e.cummings says it best:

in Just
spring     then the world is mud-
luscious  (…)
and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it’s
spring
when the world is puddle-wonderful
(…)
and bettyandisbel come dancing
from hop-scotch and jump-rope and
it’s spring….

Those of you familiar with the poem will note that I have edited out the satanic balloon man and cummings' intimations of an imminent fall from innocence.  For now, let’s let spring be itself, free of literary symbolism. 
It might even be safe to stop talking about cleaning my muddy boots and actually do it.   Like Margaret Laurence, I am warned by my Scots-Presbyterian heritage never to let my guard done, but even so….  Our back garden is rocking with birdsongs, not all of which we can identify.  For the last month, I do know that a cadre of wild canaries has been camping in the ravine cleft.  They sing beautiful complex melodies which must have taken their whole first year to learn.  Jon and I once camped on a tiny island in Algonquin and were treated each dusk to a long serenade by a warbler we never identified.  I will never forget its song, though: the twenty-seven note melody was repeated perfectly, over and over ; the last note, the twenty-eighth, however, was always BLAT, a sound which bore no relation to its predecessors.  We concluded that he was an avian dropout who had lost interest near the end of the school year;  if you have ever watched tai chi sets performed on special occasions, you might notice that the last ten of the hundred plus moves often share the same fate.  (My tai chi sets have dodgy conclusions too . Occasionally I miss the slap entirely and knock myself over.)


Still, I get it.   Love is in the air.  Spring is so exciting that it’s hard to focus.  Warblers have joined the canary chorus and, as I write this, I can hear both hairy and downy woodpeckers hammering away at lunch.  Thanks to Pam’s binocs this morning, the hoarse croak Jon and I have been puzzled by has revealed itself to be a red-bellied woodpecker high in the dying black cherry tree.  Last night at the base of the hill Jon and I flushed a rabbit so big that his cotton-ball tail was more the size of a Kleenex box.  And everywhere there are deer.  We recently ran into some who actually approached us;  we learned later that neighbours had been feeding them raw carrots and broccoli (carrots, I understand, but come on…); anyway, we know that they get lots of green roughage from our sacrificial euonymus so we feel no obligation to provide even more luxurious items.  Any day now the infant raccoons will show up, sometimes up on the roofs that they had insisted on climbing in spite of their mothers’ strong objections;  by morning they are hysterical, bawling like the babies they are.  The moms are close by --  partly amused, partly annoyed, but  probably smugly confident that a lesson has been learned.

So a sincere welcome back, warm chaotic Earth!  And now that I can get a shovel into the ground, I’m going out right now to dig a worm for my moss garden, reminding myself that, because I think of it as a tiny glassed Eden, I should probably dig two.   Even a worm deserves a significant other.

It occurred to me today as, on my hands and knees, I washed the squashed blueberries off the kitchen floor, that housework is only noticeable in its absence; had he visited here, Hamlet would have said "more honoured in the breach than in the observance."   My Beloved can live in perfect harmony with a pile of clothes on the chair, the detritus of a fly-tying marathon on the hardwood in his study, and every species of footwear scattered (sometimes in pairs) throughout the three floors.  His version of "unbearable mess" would be more likely constituted by a calculus lesson which is imperfectly clear.  However, as one who is plagued by mostly visual disturbances, I have not reached that state of nirvana where they don't bother me, despite my best efforts to ignore them and paint.  Housework is the hag that rides me.  

​This would be fine if I were wed to Spartan simplicity.  I read about one woman, an engineer, who decades ago constructed her entire household to be washable:  a flick of the switch and the house transformed into what must have been an early version of an automatic carwash.  Even granting that one could handle the issue of where to be during a wintertime wash cycle,  I think this approach still unlikely in the average home.  Slippery, for one thing. And even as one who likes stainless steel, I can't imagine a home populated by cool metal, without a range of colours and textures.  Most of us hyper-visuals (aka artists) particularly love the change of seasons. Right now the coming of winter is making me crave the warmth of glowing surfaces, hand-woven rugs, and the fireplace alight.  These seasonal adjustments will arrive slowly, as I fit my mind around the end of autumn.  Stuff will go away and different stuff will emerge.  All will need dusting.

​Even the paintings which conjure warm spaces will re-emerge.  After all, one can't spend one's entire life under a bed.

This morning my neighbour remarked to me that winter was here.  I was about to agree when it struck me that somehow we had skipped autumn.  The trees are still green but we've all turned our furnaces on and I'm making soup.

In particular, beet soup.  Beets were ten pounds for $1.44 this week so I hauled a bag home.  My hopes of roasting them evaporated when I realized that there were only five;  each one was roughly the size of Rhode Island and as such would take hours to roast.  Necessity being a mother, I peeled one, sliced it, and am going the microwave route.  If that approach fails to sweeten them sufficiently, it will be borscht in Jon's lunch for the foreseeable future.  If it works, however, I'm going back to the store.

Or I suppose I could dye anything that isn't already magenta.  Yes, I believe that beets are more blue red than autumn's cadmium red.  I noticed that first at age 10, when I lost control of a cooked beet at a Sunday dinner and rolled it across my aunt's white damask table cloth.  The room went silent.  My mother and I  imitated a beet.  It's the only root vegetable that still scares me a little.  But beets occupy two moments in my history.  The second memory is of the sweet smell of sugar beets being processed quite some distance from our home;  walking back to school after lunch in the autumn, we were wrapped in the aroma of what smelled like cookies and forever after, whenever I smell cookies baking, I am a young teenager again on my way to school in the fall.  

​But this year it may be necessary to find red on the plate.  And even if I have to rely on old paintings of a satisfactory technicolor autumn to find those cadmium reds,  but at least beet red has reported for duty in person.  I have the pink teeth to prove it.
​

I bought a half-bushel of roma tomatoes today in a fit of optimism.  Ask me if I can can (not the dance)  or make tomato sauce.  No.  Let me think about that...   Still no.  And there they sit, sullen on the kitchen floor, guessing their fate.  I just couldn't help myself.  It's that time of the year.

Just as I buy pears to paint around Christmas, I buy tomatoes in September.  They are just too gorgeous to ignore, winking at me from their glossy piles at the grocery.  I so love ripe tomatoes that  I even painted myself a big fat fall tomato which hangs in our kitchen year round to remind me of what tomatoes should look like.  I was a spoiled child.  My dad grew huge beefsteak tomatoes, harnessing the light and heat reflected off the house's white stucco.  We ate tomato sandwiches almost every day. This cadmium red bounty lasted well into November because my parents harvested all of the green tomatoes before the first frost and carefully wrapped them in newspaper, where they obligingly ripened.  At the time I thought this was quaint; now I realize it was smart.  The pink plastic tomatoes of winter have humbled me.

So I shall settle today's beauties into a pretty blue bowl and take lots of pictures.  I may even tart them up with a few equally gorgeous eggplants.  Did I mention that I bought half-bushels of them, as well as of red peppers?  It was only as I began to rehearse ratatouille recipes in my head that the penny dropped:  all three are fruits of the solanaceae family or nightshades.  This matters only because they have been associated with arthritis, something I have only in September.  Funny, that.

Should you decide nonetheless to risk immortalizing and then eating a tomato, there is one other health consideration:  cadmium is a heavy metal.  One of the many things I owe to Kathy Bailey is a safer palette.  Her red is alizarin crimson, considered by ASTM to be harmless, although I think it's fair to assume that they don't expect you to eat it.  If combined with a touch of transparent yellow and glazed over white, a highly serviceable tomato red can be created.   

However you use them, do enjoy your tomatoes;  it's definitely that time of the year.