Probably "glaze oil" is such a slow and deliberate process,  I always feel a little pang when someone acquires a piece of mine.  The Renaissance method of building from an underpainting and employing transparent glazes always feels more like a long marriage than a one-night stand with the canvas.   We are, of course, wildly overstocked with these exes of mine at home, but they don’t languish in storage — I believe in moving paintings around before they become part of the wallpaper.  And they certainly do.

But though I don't balk at wandering through the house and moving every single painting, for the most part I draw the line at moving furniture.  Because our living room is longer than wide, the current furniture arrangement was a necessity.  That was a no-brainer after having seen what the renters had done to it:  the sofa and chairs all sat with their backs to the wall, leaving a huge empty space in the middle; there wasn’t a conversational grouping to be found.  You imagined having to yell back and forth.  That was the first thing to be addressed once we had redone the floors and the walls.  It was an extremely hot summer and we still wouldn't have a/c for another thirty years.  By the time we had placed the sofa to address the fireplace from the middle of the room,  we had been reduced to a pair of wet rags, so we must have made some sort of tacit agreement that it would stay here and so it has.   So has everything, actually.  There is only one occasional chair which moves around and Jon inevitably complains.

He would have had more to complain about in the house I grew up in.  My mom had no such compunctions about predictable domestic geography.  Dad and I would arrive home in the evening to find everything but the piano in a different spot.  (For some reason Mom never moved paintings either.  I suppose that was in line with our being mirror-twins of one another — both with scoliosis but on different sides, and one left-handed, the other right).  And to be fair she exorcised her furniture habit only during the day so it was relatively safe to walk through the dark house at night.

One of my English professors, Bob Stewart, was blind, so his whole life was something of a dark house.  He was handsome, had a touch of a southern accent which did no harm when teaching American lit, and went everywhere with Yutte, his German Shepherd guide dog.   When he asked me out, I accepted readily.  We met at his apartment and walked together to see The Barber of Seville at the Playhouse.  It didn’t immediately strike me that I was standing in for Yutte that night but after walking Bob into a guy wire, I smartened up and we got there and back without a fatality.  At the apartment was a supper of pre-cooked frozen food  to reheat.  I insisted on helping with the dishes.

A month later, Bob let it casually drop that it had taken him weeks to locate his kitchen utensils.  Yutte had no serious competition.

Our shaded house is not nearly as well organized as Bob’s apartment was so we misplace things all the time.  The worst offender is Jon’s beloved Hardy fishing cap, which demands semi-weekly searches because it could and does turn up anywhere and Jon can’t imagine life without it.  My most highly-motivated searches usually involve paintings.  Because they go up and down according to the season and my mood, I often don’t miss something for months.  Suddenly, as Sherlock would say, “The Game is On!”  More than once after an anguished two-day hunt, I realize that it has been hiding in full sight and I think “Time to  move that one!  Wallpaper!”

Even if I remember that the painting is in fact gone and now living with someone else, it is a lovely feeling to walk into that home and see one of your exes on the wall.  Kismet all over again.

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!"

Although they were not in the blanket box,  treasured possessions of my father’s have been poking their noses up too.  As we are knee-deep in old house “infrastructure” upgrades, it was the old hammer with the wooden handle that warmed my heart yesterday.

Many of our keepsakes are hand tools which my father inherited from his own father.  Grandpa Keele was a fine woodworker, expert at building anything from cabinets to whole houses.  Having helped him build two houses, Dad too had learned to be a careful and competent carpenter, although his day job was as an aerospace executive.  Thanks to him, we had a garage which perfectly matched the new house, a mahogany-paneled “rec room” and a variety of built-ins which made our lives more comfortable.  (One of the only times I saw my mother mad at him was when Dad left her holding a board and went to have a cigarette.  Jon, a non-smoker, always claims that is where he is going when I am the one holding a board.)

Of the hand tools,  my favourite has always been the Yankee drill which was spring-loaded and could rotate in either direction;  whenever I went to the basement to visit with Dad while he worked on a project, I played with it endlessly.  Honestly, I have absolutely no aptitude for  woodworking but even though the old tools hang beside the workbench and look at me reproachfully,  neither Jon nor I have ever been able to say good-bye to  them.    Beloved hands have valued and used them.  

Though I wouldn’t last long as a survivalist (Jon would, fine woodworking being only one his myriad skills), I still feel some comfort in the presence of all of these hand tools - saws, measures, chisels, screwdrivers, planes, whetstones et al.  It’s always been at the back of my mind to display them but as far as wall space in a small house goes, art tends to trump utility.  Nonetheless, their spare elegance, a beauty born of married form and function, has won the family tools a permanent place in our hearts and in our home.  


**As if to remind us of their value, the hand tools occasionally report for duty just when we need them. In a moment of perfect confluency, Jon is buzzing me from the attic to bring him Grandpa’s keyhole saw.

1.  A fridge can sound like helicopter landing on the roof while still appearing to work.  

2.  When a fridge does decide to commit suicide, it demands complete privacy in a house which has been vacant for at least three days.

3.  Car radiators,on the other hand, prefer to die on a busy street.

4.  Old houses had small refrigerators, if any at all.

5.  Refrigerators have been growing in volume like a McDonalds order of fries in the last twenty years.

6.  Small new refrigerators are as rare as Skye terriers and unicorns.

7.  Removing four doors in order to pass through the living room and dining room with a fridge is inconvenient and somewhat time-consuming.

7.  It’s tough to  find your Just Shoot Me t-shirt when you need it.

On a different note, did you know that it is possible for an art gallery to lack an elevator, a back door, or any place, actually, to move art in and out?  Amazing but true.

My fervent hope is to learn nothing new at all next week.

Jane Urquart’s poetic sensibility is evident early in her novel, Sanctuary Line, when the narrator observes her love of captured light: 
(T)his house is filled with reflections.  Images of the great lake, therefore, swing into sight where you least expect them.  North windows that face south windows reproduce and scramble marine views, mirrors refract lake light, and now and then poplars from the lakeside flicker on the old painted landscapes under glass and hanging on the parlour wall.  Glass doors open to rooms where shutters are flung wide to a view of water.  The stone walls that once surrounded my aunt’s rose garden are mirrored in the round looking-glass over her dressing table.  At certain times of day, if you pull open one of the glass doors leading from her room to the patio, the view of these garden walls will be overlaid by a series of waves chasing one another towards an unseen shore.  In August the monarchs rise against blue lake water on the glass of a storm door, and surf often feathers the face of the wall clock.

​Like Urquart, I too am drawn to reflected light.  You know that I have adored leaded windows forever;  like a dragonfly’s faceted eyes, they render a multiplicity of reflections, almost iterated, just irregular enough to be interesting.  Add stained glass to this old-fashioned ballet of light, and my heart starts to pound.  The window in this old watercolour which now belongs to my niece, Anne, is a favourite --one of a bank of four in our living room.  

Thirty-five years ago, when we moved in (to the basement, because everything needed fixing), this long living room was even darker than it is now.  It did seem odd that only one end was tasked with providing all of the light but a casual walk around outside showed fireplace windows.  I knew we had a fireplace, but flanking Craftsman windows?  Turned out that the last and worst of the thirty years of renters had covered them with fake paneling.  Jon set to work, tearing out the old casements and rebuilding them,  and lo there was light.  

Just not enough.  We added a huge mirror over the fireplace to capture the light from bright end of the room.  Still more light needed!  I placed shining pewter and silver objects where I could, as part of my resistance campaign against curtains.  It would have broken my heart to have put curtains on the beautiful old bank of 12-over-1 leaded windows, but there was also the issue of privacy so...

It took a year but we finally found a set of four antique leaded windows. Weeks later, after decades of grime had been removed, they proved to be a perfect solution.  That spring I bought blue hyacinths to set on the stone ledge and we feasted off those colours for several weeks.  That is probably when my iPhoto “Event” of window shots began.  There are 87 digitals of (and through) windows from coast to coast which patiently wait for me to get working on the series which exists so far only in my head and in this one painting.  "I should clearly reflect on that," she said.

Walking back up the slope with my hands full of moss yesterday was simply an expression of my life-long fascination with panes of glass.     Even as a pre-schooler, I was something of a connoisseur of houses in that I studied each one we walked past in order to decide on my favourite.  Day after day, the outcome was the same:    the winner simply had no competition.  It boasted not only diamond-leaded windows in the living room, but the trump card of a conservatory which dominated one end of the house.  I stared at it longingly each time we walked past and imagined the delights of living there.

I grant you that a four-year-old with a passion for leaded glass is unusual.  But I had already fallen in love with conservatories.    For one thing, I knew from the huge one in the city park that they enclosed all-year-round summer.   And they smelt delicious, especially in January.  A life dream had been launched.

So what’s with the handful of moss?  Our house is about as far from a greenhouse as you can get.  But let me introduce you to the concept of moss gardens.  They survive splendidly indoors if you have the right place for them, a  dwelling place which was invented several centuries ago. When the 19th century brought with it a frenzy of global collecting, British naturalists scoured the world, competing to bring home the most exciting new species of plants.  Realistically, however, even the most successful collecting trip inevitably ended in months of ship travel;  95% of the plants died.  There had to be a way to protect these rare finds and an amateur horticulturist from Sussex named Dr. Nathaniel Ward invented one.  His glassed boxes changed the survival rate of transported exotic plants to 95%, resulting in successes like African violets (which are not violets at all, of course, but hailed from Tanganyika in the 1880's).  The glass boxes, early precursors to terraria,  were a hit at home too.  Although their original use has been displaced,  home-use Wardian cases are still manufactured today, and remain traditionally Victorian in style — little glass houses with peaked roofs and leaded glass. My four-year-old self or what remains of it absolutely adores them.

Having watched for sales of these little gems over decades, I have ended up with a small collection.  They stood empty for years.  Truth was, I had no idea what to put in them.  Not that I hadn’t tried.  There were abysmal failures.  One promising miniature jungle turned into a fungal nightmare. One which I set up outside in the spring boiled its unhappy inhabitants.  Finally I stumbled upon two green things which thrived.  One satisfied tenant is a miniature phalanopsis orchid with the aerial root system exposed (no blooms so far but I live in hope.)  The other workhorse of my Wardian cases is moss.  Many years ago I read an article about a man who lived downtown with a tiny garden that faced north.  Nothing he planted survived until he settled on mosses.   They fit the bill both in terms of size and light requirements., and he  planted every species he could find.  It must have been a beautiful place, for mosses are truly beautiful, not only for their bright emerald greens, but for their multitudinous blooms - hundreds of tiny fruiting bodies standing like tiny palm trees above their miniature landscapes.  I have some in bloom now and every day I lift the lids and marvel, taking in deep breaths of summer. 

​There is much to commend glass houses, despite what that nasty saying implies, and why roll a stone if you want to gather moss?  I heartily recommend living with, rather than in,  at least one;  if you feel the need to throw something at it, throw orchids or moss.  And don’t forget to inhale.

I don't know about you but I am plagued by "earworms"  (the term that the Japanese give to those snippets of melody and sometimes lyrics which circulate endlessly in your brain).  This week I've been treated to at least a hundred rounds of "Grandfather's Clock."  If you can overlook the literary conceit that the clock was his doppelgänger or Siamese twin, the song does explore the idea that our possessions age along with us and in that sense we share a common history.  I came to realize this when we were clearing out my dad's family home in the prairies.  Nobody else was interested in the old stuff so I packed it up and brought it home;  for me, it resonates with meaning and memory.

Thus it came about that, because my teenage aunts sold war bonds during World War II, I am the proud possessor of a red apron with "Miss Canada" emblazoned on it, as well as a jaunty navy cap.  They nicely show off my clown nose, which also appears every Halloween.  I also have bronze blocks with the Keele family crest reversed on them.  I suppose that if I were in the habit of sealing letters with wax they would come in mighty handy too.  Then there is my dad's ruby glass cup, with his name and his birthdate engraved on it.  Because I treasure it, I store it away safely so, again, not much use.

Speaking of useless artifacts,  I have both my uncle's wooden hat form and a wooden laste  (although no-one in the family does or ever did make shoes), not to mention my maternal grandmother's tiny wedding shoes, made of white kid and elegantly beaded.  I keep the latter mainly because of my mother's description of having worn them when she was a little girl playing dress-up; unfortunately, they drew the attention of her older brothers, who saw fit to lassoo her and run her through the pasture.  No damage but to pride.  She had a delicious temper and I relish picturing the aftermath.   Let's just say that the boys lived to regret it.

Grandpa's clock, however, is most closely approximated by our house as a whole.  We have left our mark on every surface here, and know which stair will creak and which radiator will clang as the heat comes back up in the morning. We have no desire to leave it.  Occasionally I have a dream in which we have sold it and moved away.  The new place is fine and loaded with bathrooms, but my heart aches and it is a relief to wake up.  We put our souls into this old house and it shares its soul with us.

In my defence, let me explain.  Today was absolutely glorious weather for November.  For any month, actually.  And the siren call of the garden could be heard.  Putting a garden to sleep for the winter is a ritual I love, although some years it has been done to the tune of mitts and a tuque.  But I'm busy tomorrow and seasonal temperatures are returning along with rain, so today had to be the day. 

Naturalizing the tableland behind the house has turned me into a leaf miser.  While the City will come and vacuum up leaves hauled out to the front street, autumn leaves are too precious to give away.  So I drag them from the patio and the driveway into our young forest, where they obligingly protect the English Ivy and the ostrich ferns over winter while turning themselves into crumbly rich mulch by spring, thus liberating us from watering during the dry spells. ( Dirty secret: sometimes I even cruise leafy neighbourhoods in the fall and shovel unwanted leaves into the back of the Prius.  Bet you too do some things you wouldn't have predicted as a ten-year-old.)

After redistributing the leaves, I crawled down the curving pathway Jon created to lead to the ravine.  I should have weeded it months ago.  But the ivy clippings could be planted in the perennial bed, so that was the next job.  I sure hope they do better than the echinacea seedlings which I transplanted last week.  Disturbed ground seems to inspire Grand Theft Auto in squirrels, who assume that it must conceal something edible and desirable that a competitor has hidden and that they themselves deserve.  So after I replanted the echinacea, I stamped hard on it with both feet.    

Then it seemed like a good idea to drag the ten foot ladder over to the far side of the house and climb up onto the roof to wash the bedroom windows.  Somehow I got back down too.  At that point I checked my watch.

Seven solid hours had passed.  My happy little brain might have been oblivious, but my back was no longer speaking to me.   Luckily I can occasionally appease it with extra-strength Robaxicet by pretending that it is green and white candy.  So while the garden has been put to bed for its long winter sleep,  I think someone will have to do the same for me tonight.

(This clumsy little watercolour was one of my first paintings.  It reminds me of how stark the house looked at the time -- a stone farmhouse without a foundation planting to be seen. A blank canvas!)

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.