It’s been a busy week, not least of which has been Dog Duty. Jon decided to go fishing, cycling and canoeing this week. He also packed the bike trainer just in case none of the above three were convenient. He is less like a desert nomad than Jonathan Swift’s satiric characters who carried everything they owned on their backs so as to avoid the necessity of language.

That left me with Theodore. As you are aware, the challenge for me in a three-pack has been to establish my Number Two credentials. Some weeks go better than others. And he and Jon have been particularly tight, to the point that when Jon gets up at midnight to make a snack, Theodore leaps off the bed to follow. When Jon failed to return last Sunday, Theodore reprised his flying Wallenda, looked around the house in vain, and became disconsolent when it became clear that I was It. Nothing like a concert of mournful howls, sharp barks and little girl whining to defeat the sleep sheep. Finally about four in the morning, I simply grabbed him and held on, pulling the blankets up over the two of us with my teeth. That desperate gambit bought us both four hours of blessed sleep. We repeated the little routine with inventive variations until two nights ago, when he finally settled for The Back-up Beloved and simply went to sleep.

This would never have happened with Jewell. She not only loved us equally but she was cooperative to a fault. Typical female, come to think of it. The only time I ever heard her growl was when Maureen brought Molson, a sweet Aussie, over to play. Jewell wasn’t about to make any other dog feel at home and flashed white teeth at the poor boy, who after that wouldn’t even get out of the car if he suspected her presence. Other than that ten minutes of mau-mauing, she was placid by nature and incredibly easy to live with.

Jewell even played like a girl. After running after a ball and retrieving it once, she politely declined such a pointless game. The one she adored, though, was hiding. I taught her to crouch behind a bush and wait for me to call for her in a worried tone. After a suitable suspense, she would leap out; I would shout “There you are!!!!” and we would both run celebratory circles around the hydrangea bed. Neither Jon nor I have ever claimed that Skyes are bright, so no surprise when she continued to play with the same vigor after the the leaves she was hiding behind had dropped. Probably, she had concluded that I was the one, too dim to notice.

Theodore, on the other hand, prefers games which take place at high speed and which he controls. He’s the local James Dean. He runs like the wind but I have yet to capture a good shot of returning the ball because the distance between A and B is rarely a straight line. As he pelts down the driveway some scintilla of scent available only to a dog calls for an abrupt right turn and off he goes. Only after pleasuring his snout with something new* does Theodore remember that he was mid-retrieve and he saunters back to the ball and chews on it pensively. Eventually he notices me standing and waiting; if I’m lucky, he eventually returns the sopping prize.

By the way, Jewell came with the name and it suited her perfectly. "Theodore" is a bit grand for our scalliwag. We should have called him MacDuff — Mac because he’s Scottish, and Duff because he comes iin ten times a day festooned with spruce twigs and leaf fragments. By himself Theodore could play all of Birnham Wood advancing on Macbeth in Act V.

Okay, I admit it. He’s an entertainment. Just be warned if you are coming to visit. Pre-Theodore, the house used to be cleaner. And quieter. Moreover, because he takes guard duty seriously, he might swear at you full-bark when you enter. But the full-body-wagging-tail tells the real story. He’s all in, whatever the game. Theodore may be a tramp but he is thoroughly our tramp!



*I read recently that a glorious sunset to a human being was equivalent to the effect of a strong unfamiliar smell on a dog.

I wish I could tell you that I’ve been feverishly painting since we last met.  Alas, nada.  I can’t stay away from the garden.  Because I crashed at six yesterday and went to bed with a dose of muscle relaxant, Jon has banned me from the garden until I demonstrate that I can walk upright..  But, even right now, where I sit working on the iMac in my studio, my nose is practically pushed against the glass because I’m afraid of missing something.

Let’s start with the aerial acrobats.   Today alone a brown thrasher bounced past me on the shrub near the back door, three turkey vultures circled (a bit worrisome, when you think about it), and a pair of red-tails surveyed the neighbourhood from the top of an old spruce until they were routed by a furious grackle.  A blackburnian warbler treated us to flashes of orange while scouting the buffet.  As usual, loud mouth blue jays and cardinals compete for the “Best Effort at a Primary Colour”, although blue jays cheat by sporting body parts with different shades of blue.  Jon just ran past with the two halves of an orange, intent on attracting the orioles who haven’t come by much since our pear trees died of storm damage but who are calling to one another.   (As I word-process this, a black squirrel has already spotted and claimed at least one of the halves.  I am told that oriole feeders have been invented and wow do we need to purchase one fast.  Oh,  the oriole has just arrived.  To eat suet??  Go figure.  I want my orange back.)

All in all, it never surprises me when a wild critter has the last laugh.  — the red-bellies continue to confound us;  we know they are living in our garden but they practise ventriloquism, then cleverly vacate their  perch before we can track their trajectory.  But the best event was last week in the park when I watched a gaggle of bird-watchers train their cameras and binoculars on a warbler while right behind them a gigantic wild turkey sauntered past.  

It’s like Cirque de Soleil around here.  There could be a bit more soleil but cirque it is!  I finally got the chippie out of the garage and closed the door. 

​Oh, dear.  Cue the red squirrels....

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief.  I come into the presence of still water,
and I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light.  For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Wendell Berry

Our world in spring is full of bustle, mine included, and my most peaceful hours are spent gardening, where I catch myself blurting out greetings to the shy friends who have returned.  “Welcome back!” goes to the busy girls who hive in the old cedar tree.  “Hello, Gorgeous,” I tell the chippie who has parked himself under the feeder.  And “Hope you ate all our grubs” is my mumbled message to the gentle skunks who visit at night, leaving a toppled path of divots across the lawn.  I say nothing to the mourning doves who have established a new nest high in the climbing euonymus;  they prefer not to draw attention to themselves but we do nod civilly and they know I wish them well.

The wonderful collection of essays titled Hope beneath our Feet:  Restoring our Place in the Natural World reminds me that it is not only the natural world which gives me hope but also the “ordinary people willing to confront despair, power and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world.”  Paul Hawken goes on to quote Adrienne Rich, who wrote “So much has been destroyed/ I have cast my lot with those / who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, /  reconstitute the world.”  Good to be reminded where we too should cast our lot -- with like-minded citizens.  But tending our gardens and welcoming our wild neighbours is a great way to get into the mood.

Right now I’m mired down in decisions:  I have to determine where each of my little soldiers will be posted over the next few months.   This business of trying to satisfy the demands of one weekend art show and three month-plus shows within a short period has given me a surprising sympathy for Napoleon.  To be honest, I’ve never thought much about the little general.  But planning troop movements is more complicated than you might think and he had all of Europe to worry about;  I have only Southern Ontario and I'm beserk.  Jon is phlegmatic, pointing out only that I have brought this on myself.  Save the truth until September, Mister, when I might manage a philosophical attitude.

Keep in mind that I am a S L O W painter and I produce only a few offspring a year.  That horrid virus in the late winter didn’t help, and it’s gardening season already.  Because it is expected that artists show recent work, my small troop of child soldiers is being stretched like a supper served to surprise guests.  In one case, I am retrieving some of them in one town and delivering them to a Georgian Bay gallery later that same day. So here I sit.  I am not painting.   I am plottingcampaigns.  I  consult calendars and I pore over maps. (To make things worse, three of the four shows demand a roll call a month early.  Good grief.)  I have a folder labeled “Where, What, When?”  Honest, I do.

Having finally resorted to a paper calendar (thank God for paper),  I draw lines with a ruler to figure out where my troops or scouting parties will be on a particular day.  When the lines cross, I know I’m in trouble.  And I can’t help thinking of Napoleon.  I am wondering if Elba didn’t feel like a bit of a relief.  I could use banishment to an island right about now.  I plan to take paints and brushes.

Lest you think I am exaggerating, here is the pansy painting, which has not progressed past the underpainting.

If there is a bird season, it occurs in April.  The air resonates with ringing calls which are less territorial than boastful, the field already having been won.  My nomination for loudest and most distinctive would have to be given to the male cardinals who proclaim their fertility from the highest branches on the tallest trees throughout the neighbourhood.

This is the time of year when the birds remember having watched Hitchcock.  YouTube is replete with hilarious episodes of large human beings terrified by birds one hundredth their weight.  They flail, they stumble;  when possible, they sprint.  Someone in close vicinity inevitably chooses to record rather than rescue.   And I have to say that I can understand the birds’ point of view.  Here you are, trying to hatch a family and suddenly everyone and their dog invade the nursery.  Only when a bird actually approaches the same weight class  does the viewer start to feel uncomfortable:  that poor man in Brampton who was being harassed by a turkey comes to mind, though I must say that the teenage golfer routed by a Canada Goose was pretty funny.

So I was actually feeling quite benign towards birds when I walked Theodore this week.  But, I discovered, avian memory also includes Mel Brooks.  I got bombed.  And, darn it, I was wearing a newish coat which was mulberry rather than black and white, so many awkward conversations ensued on the long walk home.

Not that Jon and I are strangers to the stuff.  Hand-raising both an orange-wing Amazon and a blue-and-gold macaw guarantees guano.   But, for whatever reason, knowing the producer helps.  And unlike the stealth bomber from above, Gussie and Bijou had the good manners to squat and lift their tails first so you had a chance to put them back on their perches in time.  Good manners are also observable in the parent bird who disposes of each packet of home-grown fertilizer by flying it out of the nest.  (Life Hack 586:  Don't stand ten feet away from an active nest unless you have an umbrella.)

The epiphany of the week is not elevated but it is impassioned:  “Dispensing private secretions from somewhere high in the sky on someone you’ve never even met is rude in the extreme.   Neither a pooper nor a poopee be.”  

​I suppose it could have been worse.  It might have been a 747.

It’s Sunday and our show is on Day 3;  as usual, it has been a wonderful excuse to see old friends and do catch-up.  I’m always dead-tired about now on this annual event so you might be wondering why I might choose to write today.  Put it down to my well-earned fear about what is coming tomorrow.

Tomorrow is the annual medical check-up.  Not a problem.  But we are both getting our Shingrix vaccinations.

​
For Jon, vaccination is a non-issue.  He breezes through such things and cannot understand why I don’t.  Take for example the Lymerix vaccinations of yesteryear.  We were keen to take them so we could reduce our usual hyper-vigilance when out of doors.  Jon carried on with life as usual.  I found myself with one Popeye arm and a high fever with aches everywhere;  the next three days remain a blur.  Lymerix was withdrawn from the market a few years later.  (I really really hate being the canary in the coal mine.)

​So I should have known.  The first time I had ever taken the flu shot (it was on a Friday), that evening I distinguished myself at a small dinner party by putting my face down into Helen’s wonderful boeuf bourguignon and having a little nap.  I still have annual flu shots but not before stopping by the library and stocking up on reading material.  Some years go better than others.

BUT, while every vaccine is, for me, a tiny game of Russian Roulette, I would not consider avoiding them.  Vaccines have changed the world.  My mother’s brother died of diphtheria.  Although my father was a polio victim at 18 and paralyzed from the waist down, even so he was luckier than Uncle Stan;  because Dad had been a young athlete, he succeeded in calling on his secondary muscle groups and taught himself to walk again, albeit with a limp. He even golfed into his 70’s, until post-polio syndrome started to rear its ugly head.

Few victims of “infantile paralysis,” which polio was called at the time, got off that easily.  Even forty years later than my father's challenge, we had a polio epidemic in our city.    Mary, my own pediatrician’s wee daughter,  died.  Our minister’s son ended up in a wheelchair, and a friend’s father died, while another's was able to  continue working as a lawyer but only if he slept in an iron lung.  Polio was an invisible terror:  I still freeze at the thought of having to use a public drinking fountain.

That highly contagious diseases such as polio had been almost eradicated over the last century is a tribute to the brilliant and dedicated work of medical professionals.  Skipping vaccination to avoid individual risk and relying on “herd immunity” - the protection afforded by "universal" vaccination -    is the very thing which weakens the herd and renders it susceptible.  At the moment, we are seeing this play out with measles, a disease which was thought to have been eradicated.

Melanie, who is my dear cousin’s daughter, is now a police officer;  a century ago she might not have survived to adulthood.  Luckily, she both could and did receive inoculations and we all benefit.

Let’s hear it for a healthy herd!

My soul is crying blue and I mean that literally.   The season of overcast grey is almost  over and  I can’t wait to get back into a canoe to hunt blue skies and indigo reflections with a camera.  It’s too early, of course but I’m already there in my mind's eye.   In the meantime I’m pinning my hopes on the tiny blue scyllas which will open everywhere in our grass in a day or two.   I have never satisfactorily captured their fabulous cobalt blues but it’s always worth a try and  you will find me prone in a patch of them for the next few weeks.    I may even have to break down and use cobalt blue, which is laced with heavy metal.  Classic argument for “Know thyself.”  I know I will dip my brush in the coffee at least once.

In the meantime, I spent today sifting through digitals on a wild search to appease this hunger for blue. Seems there is a twinkle in my eye and it’s time to get pregnant with the next painting.   Hours later, the eligibilty list has been narrowed down to twenty or thirty.  I sense this disappoints you but for me painting involves an interminable and unpredictable gestation period punctuated with sporadic labour pains. I choose carefully where I go next.   To illustrate the point, “Sweet Melody” is FINALLY finished and hanging in a show, although I just realized that there is no digital of the finished piece.  I must go over and try to photograph it without getting arrested as an inept art thief.

Yes, like music, art is a prime target for theft.  People come into shows and take pictures of pieces they want to reproduce for themselves.  It’s a heck of a compliment but you just hope the work doesn’t show up as a giglee print in HomeSense!  Actually, I was astonished, even thrilled to find six of my paintings  on Pinterest. (Good luck finding them again, because there is no real search engine)    Because I had either labelled the painting with titles and dimensions like a banner or chosen a small file size,  there was no serious issue with piracy.   All good.

And four of the six were predominantly blue. No surprise there.  Nor am I the only painter with a quiver of blue arrows.  The heavenly colour draws us and even intimidates us (think scylla).  Oscar Wilde admitted that he found it “harder and harder every day to live up to (his) blue china.”  I know the feeling.

But blue is more likely to inspire us into deeper thought:  Sun-bleached bones were most wonderful against the blue - that blue that will always be there as it is now after all man’s destruction is finished.  Georgia O’Keefe

Mind you, she also said, “Since I can’t sing, I paint.”

There were two shocks yesterday morning when I opened the bedroom blind.  One was the dazzling white of the snowfall which I had not expected.  Beautiful but not welcome.  I can’t wait to get raking and gardening.  Spring is such a time of excited hope.
The other shock was a truly sad one.  The mourning dove nest was empty - of eggs and of adults.  Jon thinks that a squirrel must have come across it and driven the parents off the nest;  my money was on a crow but it amounts to the same thing.   My heart is broken for them.  They will have to find another nesting site and hope that no hungry predators locate it.

The world is full of danger.  I think this is why having a home is so vital to happiness.  I have a recurring dream in which we have inexplicably sold our house and have bought another one a long distance away;  throughout the dream I long for the old place, which has already been occupied by others and is irretrievably out of reach.  It is relief to wake.  I wonder if the doves will be nostalgic for their aerie on the stone ledge where they raised three beautiful offspring or if it will represent nothing but the memory of loss.

I have bought another book by Peter Wohlleben, the German forest-keeper who wrote the splendid book The Hidden Life of Trees.  This one’s title is a teaser:  The Inner Life of Animals.  But it is the subtitle - Love, Grief, and Compassion / Surprising Observations of a Hidden World - which sealed the deal for me.   The blurb explains that “(h)orses feel shame, deer grieve, and goats discipline their kids.  Ravens call their friends by name, rats regret bad choices and butterflies choose the very best places for their children to grow up.”  Sensing the complex minds and emotions of animals has never been a stretch for me so I am loving this book -  especially the cover illustration of three goats with their vertical pupils and their scrappy appearance.  I knew one quite well when we were regularly using a landfill site which was located next to a farm.  This fellow came over to visit whenever he saw me and I ended up spending quite a bit more time at the dump than planned.   Come to think of it, I was probably the only person who absolutely loved going to the dump.

So, while I would like to drop everything and finish this book, our show is less than two weeks ago and there is still more to do.  Even if the paintings are pretty much finished, there remains what I think of as the bumph stage:  signing them (which I frequently forget to do), wiring them (a job I hate and which Jon has largely relieved me of, bless him) and creating labels and so on, hauling them around, and so on.  An elderly (95 yr-old) friend thought he had solved the problem of distribution when he sneaked a bunch of large and truly excellent paintings of his out with the recycling.  His wife quite rightly ordered him to haul them back in again.  Jon and I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.  We kind of wished we had found them first!

And so it goes, as Vonnegut would say.  Life - ain’t it awful!  But ain’t it great, especially if there are no immediate plans to sell the house.

There were two shocks yesterday morning when I opened the bedroom blind.  One was the dazzling white of the snowfall which I had not expected.  Beautiful but unwelcome.  I can’t wait to get raking and gardening.  Spring is such a time of excited hope.

The other shock was a truly sad one.  The mourning dove nest was empty - of eggs and of adults.  Jon thinks that a squirrel must have come across it and driven the parents off the nest;  my money was on a crow but it amounts to the same thing.   My heart is broken for them.  They will have to find another nesting site and hope that no hungry predators locate it.

The world is full of danger.  I think this is why having a home is so vital to happiness.  I have a recurring dream in which we have inexplicably sold our house and have bought another one a distance away;  throughout the dream I long for the old place, which has already been occupied by others and is irretrievably out of reach.  It is relief to wake.  I wonder if the doves will be nostalgic for their aerie on the stone ledge where they raised three beautiful offspring or if it will represent nothing but the memory of loss.

I am reading another book by Peter Wohlleben, the German forest-keeper who wrote the splendid book The Hidden Life of Trees.  This one’s title is a teaser:  The Inner Life of Animals.  But it is the subtitle - Love, Grief, and Compassion / Surprising Observations of a Hidden World - which sealed the deal for me.   The blurb explains that “(h)orses feel shame, deer grieve, and goats discipline their kids.  Ravens call their friends by name, rats regret bad choices and butterflies choose the very best places for their children to grow up.”  Sensing the complex minds and emotions of animals has never been a stretch for me so I am loving this book -  especially the cover illustration of three goats with their vertical pupils and their scrappy appearance.  I knew one quite well when we were regularly using a landfill site which was located next to a farm.  This fellow came over to visit whenever he saw me and I ended up spending quite a bit more time at the dump than planned.   Come to think of it, I was probably the only person who absolutely looked forward to going to the dump.

So, while I would like to drop everything and finish this book, our show is less than two weeks ago and there is still more to do.  Even if the paintings are pretty much finished, there remains what I think of as the bumph stage:  signing them (which I frequently forget to do), wiring them (a job I hate and which Jon has largely relieved me of, bless him) and creating labels and so on, hauling them around, and so on.  An elderly (95 yr-old) friend thought he had solved the problem of distribution when he sneaked a bunch of large and truly excellent paintings of his out with the recycling.  His wife quite rightly ordered him to haul them back in again.  Jon and I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.  We kind of wished we had found them first!

And so it goes, as Vonnegut would say.  Life - ain’t it awful!  But ain’t it great, especially if there are no immediate plans to sell the house.