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Suite 2, The Coal Shed,
402 William Street, Wiarton, Ontario

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Sunday with Dingo Pajama (Willis) & Boogie (Taryn), following coyote trails by snowshoe across our silent, frozen lake.

We spent a night and day in Reykjavik at Raiden’s request and I can’t say I enjoyed it...and there was a peculiar deliciousness to not liking the last leg of the trip. I’m not much of a complainer but do enjoy a luxuriant pleasure in fulsomely articulating my dislike of very specific things. 😜 There’s a difference, right? It was exactly the sort of travel speed dating I hate, the shallow collection of significant sights as an idea of a place. Plus, it’s ridiculously expensive and everything we encountered was so palpably engineered to tourists, like the whole city is a giant Viking/hipster theme park. It was mild compared to home but I swear that the sidewalks are poorly maintained just to underline to tourists the great fortitude of the Icelandic people in the face of an inhospitable land. I did enjoy the novelty and contrast of black sand for icy streets and paths. It’s funny how a difference in something as mundane as road maintenance materials can have its beauty. And I did love the starkness of this horizon and hope it breathes through into new work. The bane/blessing/magpie gleanings of the creative gaze, the two mindedness of it, both participating and observing, constantly turning over the input of your life for consideration as artistic fodder.

Last days. Because I insist on these long train routes so my eyes can gather up as much of the countryside as possible, the pattern is that I’m always back in London for a night before my flight the next day. This trip it’s two nights so that Raiden could see a bit more of it on his first time here. With the true perversity of a teen, he then doesn’t seem to care about being in London at all, I begrudge him the extra time I’m “wasting” here, that I watched the sun fall on the Lake District through train windows and didn’t stop, ...so I force him to take touristy photos in retribution. 😬 I’m grateful he doesn’t want to see any of the bourgeois monarchy/high tea/tourist-y crap and is fine doing what I would have been doing anyway; walk the entirety of the Regent’s canal (an oasis of calm..dogs! birds!), bookstores & more bookstores, the British Library (every time, a pilgrimage, all those words and the miracle of such fragile things being treasured for centuries), The Grant Zoological Museum (observation as it pertains to science, collecting as revelation), diversions down side streets. This is how I “feel” the layered time of London more...when I get lost in sections on my way to places. * Meryn Peake illustration of Cheshire Cat in a show at the library about cats in books. I LOVE his weird illustration work but his writing, not so much. It may be a classic but the Gormenghast Trilogy was a very stop and start read for me, like taking medicine you’ve been told will be good for you, that’s entirely unpleasant with no scientific proof of efficacy. Perplexingly, not a single Nicola Bayley piece in this show! @kate_selkie * A letter to T.S. Eliot from an incorrectly (😜) spelled Alison. A personal reminder that even literary giants have side projects about animals that are just as beloved (albeit by largely different audiences and with the risk of being turned into fantastically popular musicals like Cats.)

Do you do this? Gather up the bones of the earth and the sea and the beasts of the land, stuff your pockets, tumble them out to turn over and over. Move them into clean water and out, like a raccoon washing it’s food. Like gold, like wealth. All these fragments of a place that tether a sense of it to your memory. The reality of leaving mirrored in the way you must choose what stays with you and what stays here with a tiny piece of you within it. Weighing the practicalities against the aesthetics, the greed to hang on to it all, the little defeats in the decisions to leave this one and that one. The resignation of it. It must be what we do as we age, unconsciously, sometimes against our will. Set down this memory and that, cleave to the ones we can keep, transmute them with the intensity of the loss of the others. It keeps getting harder, the leaving of what I’ve chosen. I’d never describe myself as a sentimental person so I’m not sure what this need is. Maybe the scales of loss have shifted as I’ve gotten older and I hold on harder to what I can, the artifacts of my time, of me. Maybe this is being middle aged, middle timed, aware the balance of moments is inexorably shifting away from my favour. Statistical Information about the Isle of Kerrera. 1, castle, Gylen. 38 Adults and 16 children, population. 500, number of sheep our Air B n B host owns. 6, number of wild goats I saw this morning on the walk to the ferry. 5, number of dogs that belong to an old fellow who took a shine to us on the ferry. 2, tourists. Us. 1, unpaved road that ends nowhere. 1, otter THAT I SAW! 0, stores or pubs. 0, visitor cars permitted.

My mother and her family are all (or, if gone, were) walkers. Not just a brief walk to the park, but Walkers, consistent long walks. Other than horse back riding, it was really our only family activity, from early on until now, whatever the weather. It’s very much from my mum that I get this attachment to serious walking. This has also passed on...Edyn, my wooly son, is referred to as the “Walking Man” by local children as he disappears with the uni calendar, to reappear striding about Lake Charles’ roads and fields past dusk. 😂 A UK “walk” isn’t just an easy stroll down a level and marked path...it can also be the six hours we spent scrambling up and down water logged fells after the road ended, losing the path, finding ourselves in bogs, trying not to barf when we found ourselves on the edge of a crag, backtracking, down to the sea and across the rocks, up, down, muddy and sweaty. While stopping to take a bazillion photos of perfectly normal sheep doing sheep things in dramatic settings, bends in the road, and fussing over/borderline abducting dogs. 😜 We separate walk from hike in North America, but I very seldom use the latter term. It sounds more like a feat of strength to me, like ice climbing or white water kayaking...or any of the other sports preferred by outdoorsy people who like to busy their brains with problem solving their body in space. I’m emptying mine while my legs take it for a ride. We are not very good at English words about land in Canada. They are not as nuanced and specific. Perhaps it’s the great bloody size of our country, it’s seasonal masks, all the damn trees dressing the bones of it. Fells are high, barren places, but not a mountain as an Albertan or British Columbian would think of it. My uncle and cousins are of the Lake District, which is where I know the term from (plus, my literary, Anglophile fathers’ reading program). Hill walking is a bit more...mountain-y....than fell walking, but not to the point of axes and ropes etc. A scramble is reaching the peak, and Munro bagging is climbing great big Scottish mountains, but both still on your feet, not with equipment.

It’s the light that catches me and the wind that throws me. The sky is mercurial; streaming sun swept over suddenly by churning clouds, the opaque grey of driving rain to delicate dove tones of mist, moment to moment. The light will pierce and throw the largely treeless lines of the land into sharp relief with otherworldly drama. And then it’s gone and the greens and sienna of February, of now, strike up against the eye, contrasting peat bog and stone scars. What these photos can’t tell you is the sound of this. The wind howling and howling, it whistles through time, the constancy of it being stronger than the illusion of time. The contours of the land provide lees of respite from it, but exposed on the coast, it wins against me, pushing me down slippery sheep paths into the mud and water coursing from the high grounds. I force myself to heights because I’m frightened of them but don’t want to be bested by them. Raiden is buoyant in the wind and my heart clutches as he tests the edges of things, of himself. To me it’s a precipice, it’s risk, it’s death but in actuality, he’s always safely back from it. I sometimes sharply call out to “be careful” but the wind always steals the words, like I feel like it will thieve him. You still hear the terns, the shrieks as they rage at the currents, the crashes of waves, fluidity and thundering, sheep bleat somewhere unseen always, the single hydro line near the only road keens a soft hum as the gale strums it...but they are like memories of sound, ghosts against the wind. In the castle, now roofless, but standing here straight and strong since 1582, the wind chases you to the door but cannot follow you through to the dark room beneath, loses its grip on you. The sound muffles, reverberating through stone to become a dulled moan. You feel the shelter of it, what it meant to belong, by allegiances and by blood. You would not feel this if the sky was simply blue and the day easy. The wind pushes you into them, bonds you to the MacDougall’s of the past, waiting here always, hard hewn from this place and cleaved ever to this land.

To be where I am, I could have flown directly to Glasgow, taken a train and then a cab to the ferry. Instead, I’ve taken a train to Edinburgh from Gatwick, gathering up the familiar rolling change of England’s east coast through to Scotland, across from Edinburgh through the lowlands to Glasglow, then the climb through the Highlands to the edge of the Hebrides, where the air changes to sea brine, walked the miles to the ferry, across, and then a lift in an old pick up truck down the single road that tracks this island. I couldn’t do this without the efficiency of a plane to cover the primary distance, but after that, I favour inefficiency, trains and walking, the slowness and the audible cadence to them, the tracks and my footfall, my breathing. Both lend themselves to observation, the details of a place that accumulates into a small knowing of it. We all pleasure travel for different reasons; to entertain or reward ourselves, to find ease of time and climate, to test ourselves against things, for curiosity and comfort. I don’t think travel is necessarily transformative, mostly it’s just about time plus money. The way and places that we each choose to travel to is a reflection of who we are but I have no silly pretensions that it automatically builds character or makes us more interesting. But it might. Depending on how you let the sense of a place set into you. Letting the rhythm of the locality assert itself against your ideas of scheduling, letting the weather taste your mettle. Letting the wind or heat or cold strip you from traveller to settler. It may just let the land rise right up through your feet into your heart, make it shine and colour, just like the sea’s breath turning a dry stone to wet.

Last night upon arrival, I was reading texts updating me on what was being said at the council meeting, so furious at the Mayor’s continual targeting and mischaracterization of us, that I was too concentrated on my phone, blindly walking, and got completely lost in the rainy, dark streets of...Edinburgh! Today we had a pretty amazing first day of “take your teen to Scotland” by doing exactly what I like doing best on vacation in a city (aside from “only be there briefly”) ; finding a great bookstore, find snowdrops and running water, follow dogs not maps, looking at art and angles, light and lines and being ridiculously gleeful about city wildlife. It’s incredibly rewarding to know that I’ve passed on these pursuits to my children. While Raiden initially scoffed at my exclamations about snowdrops, he quickly started pointing them out. Snowdrops in the ground in February are like ecstasy pills to susceptible, green and flower starved Canadians. 😜 And, he was fascinated by Latin names for plants at the botanical gardens, wanted to spend most of the day quietly waiting for grey squirrels and pigeons to come to him (he didn’t have food but they would grab his fingers!) and lost his mind about how much more charming British robins (see foreground of photo with him in a doorway) are compared to our NA ones. “I love birds without necks the most!” We looked at the castle but decided on going in the National Gallery instead, which had an amazing exhibit called “Aviary” looking at the importance of birds in Scottish art. Fitting. And now we are snuggled into couches reading our new books from @goldenharebooks I always google “best bookshop” wherever I go and while I am not as fond of hares as rabbits, it’s close enough to be a guaranteed determinant of my random choices. It proved an excellent decision as it’s a truly fantastically curated book collection with great staff. Said staff and I exchanged tales of our home small town’s proclivities for cult like ceremonies; weather predicting albino marmots on my end, on his, processions of people swinging flaming balls on chains around their heads. I think that some combination of the two would be even more legendary. 😜

Reminder...release tonight at 9 EST on FB! Also, I changed #6! Now with birds and a tiny touch of gold leaf. :)

8. 24x24, Maple SOLD

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