An Update

I currently run two blogs. I do try to read posts by fellow bloggers that I follow but I’ve not posted on either of my blogs in quite some time. I’ve made the decision to delete my other blog at http://www.lorimilosivanskistudio.wordpress.com. I’ve enjoyed The Milos-Ivanski Studio blog and the people I’ve met online through it but this is my original blog and it’s the one I’d like to keep. It was established in 2005. Originally supported on the MSN Spaces blogging platform, the site has been migrated twice; first to Windows Live Spaces and now to the current platform at WordPress. Over the next little while I’ll be transferring some (not all) of the content at The Milos-Ivanski Studio blog to here. That content will be mostly be listed in an Art or Theatre category.
Cheers, Lori

|:Call and Answer to the Bridge Between:|

Rain taking the nights, taking the days
~ Grey and grey and grey ~

Rain misting soft
~ billow light ~

Rain driving down
~ staccato rap rap rap sharp beat ~

Rain washing over the eaves
~ waterfall roar ~

Water settling in the low lie of the fields
~ corn stubble, sharp cut ragged, edge shallow pools ~

Ditches, creeks, rivers spilling
~ corpulent greasy flows thick with silt, tumbling bobbing bits of whatever blow in – fallen, from crumbling edges and banks ~

Awash
~ away. away. wait for the.  break.  between.  breathe. ~

 

BETWEEN

Awash
~ Awash ~ Awash ~ Awash ~

First Wednesday in April

Saturday.

The snow falls.

 

Wednesday.

Patches of white linger in the shade.

The wind is fierce.

The sun is warm.

 

Above.

Around.

Below.

 

Winter is fading.

Again in the Hollow Again

First [Alpha – A – α]

I.

In the hollow she sleeps. She does not sleep. She is in the ditch laying half on grass and half on drainage rock. What little breeze there is disappears as I start down the incline. The air is stifling, hot and humid. I smell the pine trees that cover the slope of the ravine. She’s on the south side of the road. A driver wouldn’t notice but I’m walking so I can see right into the ditch. In that first glimpse I comprehend a figure gracefully reclined. An odd thought as what grace is there in this death? Her neck is a lyrical curve that rests her head on a swell of grass. Her forelegs are long with delicate ankles demurely crossed. Lost in the sound of my feet on the gravel, she’s taken me by surprise [her stillness].

In the hollow now the cars whiz by. A transport changes lanes to save me from a wake of wind and swirling grit. Always walk facing the traffic on the highway so you see cars and trucks that head towards you. Wave thanks to drivers that move over when they can. The traffic is louder than you would imagine. Faster than it seems when you’re in the car. Up on the far end of the hollow I can see something on the shoulder. It’s ruddy and small. It’s angular and ill-defined in the distance. Drawing close I see it’s her fawn. The birds have already been at its eyes. One of its hind legs is broken. The foot hangs loose from the rest. Were they together when it happened or did the fawn go searching for her when she didn’t return? Does it matter? I walk on and double back at the Coyne Road to head home.

In the hollow there’s a heat shimmer on the road. The sun blazes above. Travelling east now I can see the fawn on the other side of the road. The eyes are cavernous holes that follow me as I walk. I pass opposite the spot where the doe lies. I can’t see her [smooth brow and the soft sweep of long lashes that shade closed eyes] in the ditch. Two cars rush up parallel behind me as a driver defies the solid yellow line to pass on a blind slope. The passing car, close now to the shoulder where I walk, sends a blast of hot air and dust to wrap around me. In my memory she [the doe] reclines [elegant-in grace-in sorrow] as her fawn looks [dark-empty] for her return.

In the hollow a single crow calls. There are three but only one speaks.

II.

In the hollow I can hear a sound [buzzing through the insulation of my ear buds]. Leave the volume low as you walk along the highway. If you can hear your footsteps you should be able to hear oncoming traffic. The origin of the sound is just ahead. It is [was] a raccoon [not fat but bloated] . I can’t see flies but I can hear [a legion – a multitude – a horror] them. The sound is aggressively loud. I think the swollen carcass must be acting as a hollow chamber amplifying the sound of what lies within. I don’t [can’t – won’t] look as I walk by. The fur is beautiful. If I reach out to stroke it would I find an incredible lush softness [vibrating with what lies beneath]? When I double back I look straight ahead. I know [hear] it [you] is [are] there. The air is heavy and cloying. Rain is on the way.

 In the hollow there are three crows. They don’t speak.

III.

In the hollow Queen Anne’s Lace [Daucus carota – Why do I know that?] gives off a heavenly smell. Flattened skin tanned to leather is marked with sparse patches of fur. Yellow bone [forearm, jaw bone, sharp stab of teeth] is an anchor that still defines the [broken] form. A car speeds by.

In the hollow there are no crows.

Last [Omega – Ω – ω]

In the hollow a crow calls.

Again ∞:║:∞ Again ∞:║:∞ Again ∞:║:∞ Again  ∞:║:∞ Again ∞:║:∞ Again

A Pot is a Pot is a Pot Except for When It’s Not

I like the pot. It’s a beauty. It’s cast iron with an enamel coating. The pot’s a nice size and it cleans up like a dream. I’ve baked cabbage rolls in the pot. I’ve roasted chickens stuffed with garlic and rosemary. I’ve spent hours simmering beef bourguignon. Last December the pot helped grace my table with the prime rib roast I make for Christmas each year.

The pot was a wedding present. Not my wedding mind you.

I have a lovely friend. She met a man and fell in love. They threw caution to the wind, picked up their lives, and moved across the country. They bought a house. They made new friends. They got married. They received the pot as a wedding present. The marriage ended. The house was sold. They divided the things they wanted and gave away what they didn’t. And now I have the pot.

I was okay to take the pot. I’m always up for new cookware. Well I was okay until someone mentioned that the pot was high-end Le Creuset cookware. A quick internet search revealed what I was calling a roasting pan was in fact a pot referred to as a Dutch oven and the one taking up space in my cupboard had a suggested retail price of $380.00 …plus tax. Of course I called my friend and tried to return it. She just laughed and said she’d known it was an expensive item but didn’t care. She wanted it gone. It was a mystery to her why her ex in-laws had bought it as a wedding gift as neither she nor the man she’d married were big home cooks.

Eating together is one of those traditions that strengthen the ties that bind. You sit and talk. You share yourself as you share your meal. Perhaps that was what the pot was supposed to represent as a wedding gift – the opportunity to build, in part, the foundation created when lives are experienced together. I don’t know.  Maybe my friend’s ex in-laws are the kind of people who like to spend hundreds of dollars on vaguely unsuitable gifts. Or maybe the pot wasn’t only a pot but instead a best wish for a happy future together.

The pot isn’t the most expensive item that Le Creuset makes. I found a goose pot on Amazon selling for $674.00. If you believe the online reviews it’s worth every penny. I can’t even imagine spending that kind of cash for a pot or a pan. That being said, chances are I’m going to own the pot longer than my friend was married. Longer even than the sum total time of her relationship.

Le Creuset cookware is warranted to be free from defects in material and workmanship at the time of its purchase. If it’s broken when you buy it they replace it. I spoke to my friend last week. She moved back across the country earlier this year and she’s still trying to figure out where it all went wrong. It’s never easy. People aren’t cookware. Relationships don’t come with any kind of guarantee. The strength of the promises made between two people is only equal to the will and intent of the parties joined together. And what you see (or choose to see) isn’t always what you get.  If someone is broken, a bad fit, or just wrong, you don’t get to simply reset. You either decide you can live that way or you move on.  It’s much easier to fix a pot.

I’m going to make something warm and bubbly this weekend. I’m not sure what yet but it’s going to be one of those dishes that fill the house with a marvellous smell. As I sit down to share my meal I’ll spare a thought of thanks to my friend for her friendship as well as the pot. I think she’s going to be okay. It will take more of letting things go but she’s well on her way. And like the pot her heart might even find a new home.

Because the pot and the marriage contract are the promise and the meal and the relationship are the fulfillment the music for this post is the Wilder Adkins song When I’m Married

Within the Embrace of Entropy and The Arrow of Time

There is a row of spruce trees at the back of the yard. The tallest was struck by lightning. I was two rooms deep into the house and the light that came in was the most incredible thing to see. There was a wash of the coldest white and blue. And though there were no shadows everything was eerily defined. The noise that followed was felt as much as it was heard. The tree still stands but almost four years on it hasn’t healed. The strike left a scar that runs down the length of the trunk to the ground. With every season the crack gets deeper.

I had a lovely thought last week. I was driving in the car and just out of the blue it came to me. It was a wonderful memory – well two sort of but they were connected. The memory was of my youngest nephew, Matthew, when he was small.  We had rented a hockey rink for a birthday party and Matthew was so excited to come and get on the ice. He must have been around 4 maybe…I’m not sure… but I do remember how happy he was. The second part also had to do with an arena. My sister brought her boys to see my stepson play and as he came out of the dressing room he said hello to Matthew. Matthew’s whole face lit up because he’d been acknowledged by this older boy heading out to the ice to play. I honestly don’t think he could have been happier that day. He would have loved to play hockey. I’m sure of it. He never got the chance. He was born with an adorable sideways smile and a progressive neuromuscular disease.

Picture time as a hallway broken up by consecutive doors. Each door represents a unit of time. The doors are sheer enough to look back through but there are layers and layers of them. Each one takes you further away from where you have been and try though you may you can never bridge that space between now and then. No matter how much you may long for the “before”, just thin doors of time away, there is only what comes after. We say things like “I would give anything if I could have just one more day…one more hour” but the truth is one more hour or one more day wouldn’t be enough.

The night that Matthew died always comes back to me in sound bites and still pictures – the phone call – the car ride – standing on the porch as they return from the hospital – my sister opening the car door – her face as she tells me and it’s like that flash of lightning filling everything up with something alien and terrifying as I move in slow motion to take her into my arms. The rest of the night, the weeks, the months, the years, are marked by moments of awful clarity distinct as pale figures caught naked in the stark flickering of a strobe light.

Matthew lived 16 years. The brevity of his life along with much of what he endured and what has come to pass since he left us is beyond difficult to fully grasp. I am grateful for the things that offer a counter balance to the downright unfairness of it all. I need those things; like those days in the arena, or any moment I’m called to mind the good things that were a part of his life and what good things he brought to all of ours.

I like to watch the birds in the garden. I can see them as I gaze out the kitchen window. The blue jays scream and argue. The woodpeckers and nuthatches are a circus of acrobats as they negotiate the expanse of tree trunks. There are different kinds of sparrows, cardinal couples, and flocks of dark-eyed juncos. In the summer there’ll be hummingbirds and orioles. Several times a day the birds will suddenly scatter. I don’t know why. Perhaps there’s a noise, a movement, or a falling shadow that sets them off. Often it’s nothing and they quickly return. Sometimes though, that shadow will be a hunting hawk. Maybe a red tail but more likely a Cooper’s hawk. There will be a flash of darkness and then silence as a few stray feathers float to the ground.

The garden will be silent then, sometimes for hours.  I watch to see if the birds return. And they do but I can never tell if they’re the same ones that were here before.  At dawn and dusk there’s always the call of the mourning doves. A storm might blow in and I’ll watch as a curtain of rain sweeps across the fields before it engulfs the house.

I wonder how long it will be until the spruce tree finally falls.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Music for this post –Noah Gundersen & The Forest Rangers- Day is Gone 

 

 

The Black House

It’s very late. Or very early depending on how you look at it. There’s a smell – dry, copper and electric scorch. It’s so strong that I get up to fumble along in the darkness looking for a source. The smell is everywhere and nowhere so I go back to bed. I lay under the sheet with one leg out trying to find the best position for comfort in the heat. It’s going to rain late tomorrow but it’s not tomorrow yet. In the dark, with my head pointing west and my feet pointing east (well to be completely clear my one foot is pointing north-east) I close my eyes and think about the black house.

The black house rests road side near a curve on Pioneer Line. Pioneer Line runs west to east, or east to west, relative to your starting point and destination. The black house was built on the Dutton end of the curve. It’s a double curve and if you were generous you could call it an S curve but it’s so stretched out it barely qualifies as any kind of letter. Spanning the townships of Dutton/Dunwich and West Elgin, Pioneer Line travels through the villages of Dutton, and West Lorne, and touches the edge of Rodney. The section between Dutton and West Lorne runs parallel to the 401 corridor and in the distance you can see cars and transport trucks on the highway, 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year. They say that Pioneer Line, or a portion of it, used to be called Starvation Road. The story goes that the soil wasn’t any good (too much clay or too wet- it’s not clear) and you can’t feed a family on land that won’t yield. I don’t know if it’s a true story.

I’m not sure how old the black house is. It’s small so it can’t be very new. People don’t build that kind of small any more. It hasn’t been black for very long though. Before it was black it was clapboard white; faded, peeling, and abandoned, in a lot that was mowed just enough to keep the weeds down. Someone bought it in the spring and began to fix it up but didn’t finish. Before the work stopped the siding was removed exposing the black tar paper underneath.

New houses, old houses, derelict houses, barely there foundations that mark where farmhouses once stood, call Pioneer Line home. They are in the process of being, or becoming something, or un-becoming something-but not the black house. Stuck between being something old(er) and maybe something new, it’s in limbo. Curtain-less windows expose the studs of gutted walls. One window on the second floor is gone leaving the upstairs open to the elements. As I lay in bed I wonder if the air in the black house smells scorched like the air in my house. I wonder if bats or birds come and go through the open window. Do they fill the upstairs bedroom with fluttering wings and shrill cries or is it silent like my room? I wonder if anyone else thinks about the black house, perhaps someone who used to live there. How would it feel to see the black house and remember when you looked out of the windows to see the world passing by instead of peering in through the windows to find only emptiness where you once stood?

When dawn comes I know I’ll see the branches of the cedar tree outside my bedroom window turn warm with that break of day. The light will steal past the lace curtain and wake the cat asleep at the end of my bed. He’ll stir and stretch, sending up a small scatter of dust. The motes will float a lazy dance in the early morning glow. I know daylight will be easing into the black house too, spilling through the grime covered glass, inching across the bare floors, and expanding into the empty rooms.

I draw in a breath of warm air and think about later today when I’ll shut my blinds to keep out the afternoon swelter. There are no blinds to close in the black house. With the August sun overhead the air inside will be harsh and heavy; so hot if you aren’t careful you’ll choke on it. All around the house there’ll be the smell of corn, sweet and cloying, in the afternoon haze. In the distance the heat shimmer on Pioneer Line will look like water on the road. The background hum of the traffic on the 401 will, as ever, be constant and as it is August there’ll be the rising scream of the cicadas’ chorus.

I check the clock and see that it’s even later…or earlier. As I said it all depends on your point of view. I flip my pillow over to the cool side and drift off into sleep thinking about the trucks passing by, day in and day out, and about the black house small against the sky, baking in the sun, just before (if you’re coming) or after (if you’re going) the curve on Pioneer Line.

 

Music for this post is The Devlins Waiting

 

 

 

Step by Step

I hike nearby trails and the shoreline for inspiration and pleasure year round. I stop often to take pictures, draw in my sketch book, wade out into the shallow waters of Lake Erie in summer, or brave the ice bound shores in winter. There are times though when I want to walk without any purpose other than to walk, think a little (or a lot), and feel the ground move beneath my feet. During the winter poor weather and snow banks force me inside to walk for kilometres on a gym treadmill. Early spring brings the thaw but not good walking conditions. The snow banks are dark with dirt and crusted salt. As the banks melt, brine bleached trash and frozen roadkill are laid bare. Sometimes the snow under the dead animals takes longer to melt and the bodies seem to sleep curled up on snowy biers sporadically marking the gravel shoulder. Summer has now arrived and with the fair weather I can finally walk along the roadside. I set up little routes for myself so I’m not gone for too long (or too short- I want to take a WALK not a little stroll). I use Google maps to pick a distance and direction. Seven to ten kilometres does the trick, the points of the compass are variable.

I walk mostly in the early evening to avoid the sun and the heat. I try not to start too late as nightfall on a rural road is a singularly isolating experience. I don’t mind being alone. In the dark though, walking along the unlit gravel shoulder, the lights of distant farm houses take on a mysterious aura. You can hear an approaching car from far away but the sudden interruption of the headlights is still blinding. It must be startling to see a woman at the side of the road caught in the beams, stark against the darkness of the fields. A glance into the rear view mirror would show me melting from the red cast of the tail lights to fade back into the darkness. Last month I did walk past the village boundary very late to try to see the Aurora Borealis. It was well past midnight, still and clear. I didn’t go far though as the coyotes were sending up a full chorus that echoed round the fields to come back from the darkness all around.

So I walk in the early evening where I often encounter the golden hour. The quality of light is such that everything is bathed in a warm glow. The growing darkness under the hedgerows is velvet soft. My shadow stretches out away from me, a thin giant, elongated by the rays of the sinking sun. Walking along the roadside I can take the time to see things. I acknowledge birds on barbed wire fences, deer off in the thickets, all of the sky with the setting sun and the rising moon opposite each other, and everything else around me. I listen to the wind and the sound of my feet crunching on the gravel. I think about everything and nothing. It doesn’t free me from the cares and concerns that mark any life. It’s true that you take yourself with you wherever you go. But for ever how long it is that I am walking I enjoy the act of being where I am with nothing else to do but move forward and be.

The song for this post is The Talking Heads ‘Road to Nowhere’ because I’m walking but I’m not really going anywhere other than exactly where I am.

Friendship

I’ve been on Facebook since 2007. My account currently indicates that I have 440 Facebook friends. Some of the people on my Friends List are family or individuals I actually know. Others are people who I have common interests with, or I “liked” something on a page we both frequent, or we play the same online game. I occasionally go through my Friends List to clear accounts that have been abandoned or were added for games I don’t play any more. I don’t always remove former game players as I sometimes develop an online relationship that I guess would translate to a kind of neighbourly liking of each others’ posts or commenting on happy or sad statuses. Recently whilst cleaning up my account I discovered that two people on my List had passed away. We’d played the same Facebook game. Neither had popped up on my feed for a while and when I checked their accounts there were messages of condolence, outpourings of grief and disbelief, from people who actually knew them.

One account belonged to a young man who had died of complications following a car accident. The other account belonged to a woman who, along with other members of her family, had been murdered. The postings on their account pages clearly spoke to the tragedy of these deaths and that the deceased were well loved and held a special place in the hearts of those who knew them. That, more than anything else, was why I deleted their accounts from my Friends List.

I didn’t know either of these people in real life but I felt a twinge of guilt removing them from my Friends List. For several years I’d seen their family/friends photos as well as status postings about life and family events. We’d liked some of the same things. But that didn’t make us friends. Perhaps that twinge of guilt had to do with sympathy for lives lost to violence and lives ended too soon. Or maybe it had to do with that overlapping of our online interactions that provided an illusion of connection. I’m not sure. I do know that for me, maintaining access to those two Facebook accounts, where their friends and families were posting heartbreaking messages, felt like an invasion of privacy. Facebook is a public forum but the few postings I did read made me feel as if I was eavesdropping on a very personal and painful conversation that I had no right to hear. Even though they will never know, deleting those account connections seemed like the very least I could do to honour the loss, and respect and acknowledge the right of their friends and families to grieve.

Music for this post – I went back and forth trying to decide what would best suit this post and I finally decided on Warren Zevon’s ‘Keep Me In Your Heart’ . I hope the friends and families of those who passed on will hold close to any good memories they have.

A quick bit of research revealed that most online organizations have, or are in the process of implementing, policies that deal with death and the internet. I think they still have a long way to go. Perhaps in the future instead of sifting through ancient tombs to explore history, archaeologists will have to recreate ancient operating systems and applications to access first hand knowledge of life (and death) during the birth of the digital age.

 

Socks and Puddles

I have water in my basement. I don’t mean a sink with a tap (though I have that down there as well). I mean I have water leaking into my basement which led to someone asking me why there was a sock in my toilet. At first glance the “toilet sock” and a leaky basement wouldn’t seem connected but there are. Normally I can attribute things out of place to Lola. Out of my 2 cats she’s the one who likes to carry things around. Once I saw her walk by with a ring box clenched in her mouth. I’m not sure where she was going with it but I made sure she didn’t get there. She is fond of the toilet in a butt in the air head below the rim sort of way but to my knowledge she hasn’t been storing stuff in there.

I most likely dropped the sock in the toilet while I was sorting laundry in the bathroom. My washer is in the basement so I’ve been sorting laundry upstairs because of the puddles downstairs. Thank goodness someone saw the sock before using the toilet. I’m pretty sure it would have created a clog if flushed down. I would prefer to have zero puddles inside so the prospect of an overflowing toilet on top of the already wet basement was very unattractive.

My house was built in 1910 so it wouldn’t have been constructed with a full basement. Here’s a picture of my house (probably taken 1940 to 1950-ish).

Back in the day, with no electricity or plumbing, a basement wasn’t important because you didn’t need to make sure you had a warm space to protect your infrastructure from the elements. My basement shows clear signs that it was a work in progress for a number of years with a hodgepodge of older and newer bits formed from different materials. There’s a room in my basement that’s not completely dug out and we do our best to pretend it doesn’t exist because it’s kind of creepy.

So where is the water coming from? Well something called hydrostatic pressure is pushing ground water from the spring thaw up through any little crack it can find in the foundation. We have a sump pump pit but it can only do so much. It wasn’t a problem when we first moved in but when the municipality updated the drains along the road, the change in the elevation of the shoulder resulted in increased snow and rain run off onto our property. I’m sure it didn’t help that we went awhile without cleaning out our eaves. Last summer we had the roof re-shingled and the roofers took care of that for us. It was quite timely as there was a sapling growing up there that needed to come out before it got much larger.

Daily vacuuming helps to keep the water under control but it gets a bit disheartening to have to jump puddles in your basement. To add insult to injury my dryer broke down last week. The basement is too wet to have a repair tech come and fix the dryer right now. I do have a clothes line outside but it’s April and April means spring showers which makes hanging clothes out to dry an iffy proposition. Alas my laundry is beset both inside and out by the forces of nature. Hopefully everything will dry out soon. Eventually I’ll have to take care of the basement puddle problem permanently as a leaky foundation can lead to a whole host of other serious problems. It’ll be expensive …what house repair isn’t? But it would be even more expensive just to leave it. In the mean time I’ll do my best to keep my feet dry and my socks out of the toilet.

Music for this post;

Al Jolson – April Showers
MC Tracky-Dactyl – Laundryman