Continuity

It may seem that for Canadians the world of war and political conflict is far away. This is a fact that often leads people to make this country their home, to hope for the safety and prosperity of their children, and to look forward to a long and peaceful old age.

But when violence erupts in other parts of the world, and we experience our connection to it, we are reminded again of how the majority of us living in Canada now have our ancestry in places outside our country. In recent years, it feels like so many people in my life are grieving for friends and families displaced or killed in other places, or worried for them.

I chose this post’s topic in consideration of how much disruption irresponsible leaders unleash on the world. Currently, several of my courses have included some type of study on population growth/decline. What I see in the overall story of humans is that despite the death and suffering they inflict on so many people, dictatorships with their big wars and the bankrupt economies they create, are unable to make any significant change. They do nothing to disrupt the underlying patterns of life. They are meaningless to history once those they harm are gone.

Canada goose on a roof of the geological sciences section of the natural sciences buildings. Western University (UWO). London Ontario. March 2022.

In London, Ontario, at this time of year, one such reminder (albeit not human) is the Canada Goose. It was noisy on campus last week, a constant reminder of the continuity of life, as I will explain. On Monday, I set one rule: while on campus I would take a picture of every goose on a roof that I encountered. To try to keep with the rule, I eventually had to stay inside as much as possible, because it took a lot more time from the day than I expected.

University College Building. UWO.

Western University is home to year-round geese residents. During the fall and winter they are rather docile. They travel in large groups, usually grazing across the lawns. When the oak trees drop their acorns the geese converge to the sidewalks under these trees shortly after every class-change. The crowds of students walking across the seeds breaks open the shells and the geese rush in to take them.

The day began with this loner calling out.

Another honker at mid-morning.

By the afternoon, pairs began to form. Four geese claim some of the engineering buildings.

An oak tree at Talbot College building, with a scattering of acorns. Fall 2021.

(Click on an image to enlarge–some of the birds aren’t visible in the gallery layout.)

At this time of year, the birds begin their fight for territory and mates, and start to pair off. One way to attract a potential partner is to claim a roof and commence the noisy mating call process. By Friday, the birds had begun to settle down. But very soon, the nests and the eggs will happen and then goslings. At this point, it is not uncommon for students to be attacked by ground and by air, should they enter goose-occupied zones.

The food truck that pays homage to the UWO geese population. Do you see the two bosses looking down from above?

Clarity Inside the Box

A friend of mine once said, in a moment of frustration, “I just want to be homeless. I want to walk away from everything and live on the street.” Then he added, “Sounds crazy, doesn’t it?” Sometimes I wonder if anyone can pursue money and material rewards and remain sane. I mean, of course, we all need food, shelter and a few other things to survive, yet, what is life when we give over to the mere pursuit of a lifestyle?

Serendipity of the Green House

“Why can’t that house be for sale?” my husband had asked.  We were driving around, spending time frivolously because we had arrived early for our next house viewing appointment.  He had spoke when we passed a house with a large yard and a garage.  It was clean and tidy, with dozens of trees and a space for a garden and flower beds.  We had seen several houses that day, ranging in age, size, price, but almost all of them were in poor condition, surrounded by concrete with very few trees and little space for grass.  Poorly built and then damaged further by people and poor choices, weather and age.

I teased him about the house he had noticed, “But it’s green.”  Green is not his favourite colour.

He drove the car away and we went on to meet the agent at the next house we were to see.  It was much newer than the others with all the fancy finishes of stone work, stucco, and a monster-sized deck that overtook the back yard.  Even with its over-developed grade its concrete basement walls were leaking water; the dry wall was crumbling and there were the signs of black mould in the linoleum flooring of the bathroom and utility room.  Looking closely we saw the stone was falling away from the house and the stucco was damaged.  We noticed a floor joist had been cut to allow for a heat vent to run under a heavy stone fireplace.  The floor had sagged.

We returned to Weyburn a little disappointed, resigned to wait for the new spring listings the real estate agent promised would come.  Four days later I received an email from her with information about a new listing.  I showed it to my husband.  Lots of trees, neat and tidy home with a detached garage.   The house was green.  He grinned.

Serendipity was something I had always thought interesting, that quirky phenomena in life that seems to suggest that everything happens for a reason.  Of course, I never thought any more of odd little coincidences and I never based any life decision on signs from the universe.  Then life took a sharp turn toward a series of very challenging experiences for me.  I had to ask what it all meant, why?  Not asking would be resignation, a collapse into anger and bitterness.  Instead, I began to trust in serendipity.

I discovered that having the attitude that life is a series of serendipitous events is regenerative.  Serendipity is the practice of actively looking for connection with the world around us.  I noticed that even the most painful experiences held purpose, an opportunity for growth.  I’ve done this practice long enough now that something else has begun to arise, something more meaningful than simply narrating my story in a pattern of meaning.  To seek serendipity is to cultivate self-worth.  Self-worth is essential to feeling a true sense of belonging in the world; we cultivate peace, acceptance and happiness in our own lives with this practice.

On Tuesday we moved into the green house.  Already we’ve met several people in the neighbourhood who have stopped in, expressed their curiosity about us, asked for our stories and offered theirs in return.  We live among trees and gardens, on a street where someone thinks to feed the squirrel (he has hidden peanuts throughout our garden), and almost everyone has a dog.  The yards are tidy and clean.  We are still adjusting to the quiet calm of this place, so unlike Weyburn.  Here the traffic noise seems not to exist and there has yet to be any angry outbursts or screaming arising from a neighbouring house.  I don’t expect this to happen.  We are already lapsing into a sense of security.  I feel gratitude for the opportunity to bring my children here, to be part of a healthy community of diverse people ranging in ages, education, experience and cultural backgrounds.

On the day that we arrived I began saying to my kids that it feels good to be here, but the word ‘good’ didn’t seem strong enough to hold everything I felt.  I hesitated after speaking “This place feels…”

My youngest daughter finished the thought:  “It feels like home.”

Groundlessness: Piloting a Balloon

preparing the basket and burner

Nothing is more exhilarating–or terrifying–than being a member of a hot air balloon pilot’s ground crew.  To make a mistake is to risk endangering the flyers, or at very least, damaging expensive equipment.  Yet, to be part of the team that fills a thin fabric skin with air, to watch it carry a person toward the clouds leaves me with a deep feeling of humility and pride both at once.

Life Outside and the Memories of Books

I have been packing up the house, making good time with my work until I met with our books. Here all sense of the task at hand evaporated. I sometimes struggle to remember the details of how or what happened in any given day, but I can pick up a book I purchased twenty years ago and remember the sharpness of the ordinary things that surrounded me in the moments before enfolding myself into the world of the author’s mind.

In Quiet Retreat, Intersections of Memories, Anticipating Change

Snowing, again, the sky is a white veil. Very slowly, winter is shrinking, but it is a merciless process. Even as walls of snow diminish, driving in Weyburn remains stressful. On some corners the ice and snow piles are taller than the car, sight lines aren’t clear. If I didn’t know where I was going, I’d be lost in the corridors, these white spaces like tunnels.

I yearned for a long, deep winter, time to sink into myself and contemplate the next phase of my life. But I’m ready for spring, its movement, its smells and warmth. I want freedom from winter parkas and hats, gloves and boots. All the boxes in my storage spaces are nearly empty, the clutter is gone. Winter work is over.

By September we will be in another city, living in a different house. My husband will be doing a different job. My kids will have a new school, new friends, new routines. This changes what I had been planning.

Transitions produce a lot of noise inside my mind, a roar of energy that—like hyperlinks—demands exploration. Today was a day of constant, white noise, like an itch I can’t scratch. Seeking calm, I was drawn to Kathleen Wall’s blog, Blue Duets. Kathleen’s strong, reassuring writing has a way of grounding me with concrete reminders that the life of the mind is as real as the life of cats, weather, and the rustling sounds of children who really aren’t children anymore.

Spring, thirteen years ago, comes back to me today, when I remember Kathleen’s voice outside of class, on a stairwell where we encountered each other, travelling in opposite directions. She extended me a generous kindness, which has remained in my life like a pebble tossed in a pool, with ever-widening effect. Today, the memory pulled so strongly that I could almost feel my body sway in movement, continuing down the stairs, around corners and past the Library. Through the Administration-Humanities building, walking the corridors of the Language Institute, on my way to Luther College to meet with a group of honours and masters students. I had been humming, reached to open the door to the sunny outside, and was stopped by a young man who asked if he could open it for me.

Thirteen years ago I was finishing my undergraduate studies; this was the end of the line. Humming kept my daughter from moving too much, which threatened the stability of my breakfast, lunch, and everything else. Some of the students on campus had begun to recognize me, that woman with the bulging belly, squawking as though she were musical. They were kind, opening doors and suggesting I take their spot on elevators. I still preferred stairs to closed-in spaces, despite the heavy exhaustion of the last trimester of pregnancy.

My life was changing, another bend that I sensed but couldn’t fully understand. How can anyone know what parenthood will be, for them, until it is here?

I was the recipient of the most incredible gift when I was a student. For the last half of my ten years at the University of Regina I was mentored by a faculty member with a Ph.D. from the University of Alberta, who possessed a passion for literary theory and philosophical ideas that he couldn’t contain. He taught through a series of term contracts, and without graduate students to supervise, he turned the full-force of his enthusiasm on any of us undergrads who didn’t run screaming. I was the keener who stayed to listen.

Thirteen years ago I was also taking an honours/graduate class on postcolonial literature and theory. The novel, Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys intersected Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Wide Sargasso Sea was from the postcolonial class. Jane Eyre was from Kathleen’s class. The two entwined to become my honours thesis, a mixed reading of a dialogue of one text responding to the other, while feminist readings of both texts compelled me to engage in a conversation about the depiction of the ‘mad woman’ in literature. It was this last component, the unexpected glimpse of institutionalized mentally ill women that left me filled with gnawing uncertainty.

About doubt, I want to say something like this: sometimes, on paper, theorists don’t understand. They don’t know, not outside of metaphor, how real lives exist within theoretical constructs. Constructs of madness. Motherhood. Seasons, changes, a poem. Consider Freud. Words are tools to explain, argue, carve out space and defend. It’s not a game. Rhys challenged Bronte for stealing the voice of the Creole woman, subjugating her for her own colonial narrative. What would I subjugate, for my own narrative of academic survival? I was confronted with how little I knew—not of ideas and systems, but of life—and how much I was risking if I got it wrong.

I’ve been remembering one of my mentor’s favourite discussion topics, preaching to the choir. These conversations attached to that tag line, link to categories like ‘dissemination of knowledge’, Otherness, difference, ‘philosophical debate,’ margins, gaps, ruptures, ‘free play of ideas,’ alterity, subjectivity, choice, transcendence. What remains in my thoughts are now ghostly fragments, worked and reworked in memory, recalled, layered with new experiences. Right now, I can’t remember the way we had conversations about real-world impact, experience outside of the academy, speaking and finding one’s own way.  There’s only one, his personal story about life lessons on compassion, not learned in school.

Ethics, a complicated tangle of experiences and ideas, a cultivation of empathy through the imaginative, metaphor-making capacity of the mind.

After that last class with Kathleen, when the semester had ended, I was officially not a student. My sole identity on campus was as Faculty Association staff, pondering a couple of unsolicited job offers from the world of HR management, a graduation present. I was moving further from the classroom.

I was on campus one day, in that thin sliver of time between classes ending and motherhood beginning. I was stopped outside Printing Services by a woman I knew through work, someone from Personnel. She was wildly excited about babies, couldn’t wait for my pregnancy to be over. We had barely parted company when I turned and encountered a member of the English department faculty. We talked for a while about parenting and children, and it wasn’t long before two other department members had joined us. The three of them hovered with me on the edge of the lounging pit in the Ad-Hum, the conversation turning sharply from motherhood to a current department hiring process, a meeting from which they were returning. Faculty positions for the next year had been decided, the hiring committee had chosen a candidate for the tenure-track job. Unexpectedly, I was tangled in a conversation of behind-the-scenes politics that students rarely glimpse that openly. This finesse of negotiation, an assertion of emotion that was ever-present in the office at work with clients, but rare in open corridors. I slipped away, like an intruder upon an existing conversation, having learned that a theorist, already on campus, with a Ph.D. from the University of Alberta was going to be hired.

By the end of August I was in northern Alberta with a three-month old baby, newly converted into a full-time mother and house wife. My husband was barely home because of the hours he worked, in a community where I didn’t know anyone. Life was suddenly a tunnel of white, undefined space, a wordless hum of energy, an emptiness of politics and conversation. For a long time, I didn’t know where I was going. I’ve since come to understand that my most powerful experiences have almost always happened in the in-between.  Within undefined spaces, like white-walled corridors where nothing/everything is anticipated.

Pickles and Paradigms

“the problem with bombs and pickle barrels is not getting the bomb inside the pickle barrel, it’s knowing how to find the pickle barrel, that’s always been the harder problem.   Malcolm Gladwell

One of the interesting things about researching a town, learning its geography, history, and about its people is discovering the amazing flashes of ingenuity that can rupture within a society. Sometimes there can be clusters of innovative ideas—some of them can be BIG ideas of ‘change the world’ magnitude—and then it fizzles out. The spark of idea and flash of insight fades and nothing alters for decades. Change might even become something to fear and resist.

When I left off talking about the history of Weyburn, I had stated that the rail lines had been surveyed and built and settlers were coming and making sod houses. In the early 1900s Saskatchewan was a place of optimism, and this influx of energy, hopefulness, and the mix of people from various backgrounds seemed to create an exciting mix of social, political, technological and environmental potential.

In the very least, the wood and brick, traditional-style buildings symbolically represent the beginning of the end, a fizzle of all that energy and possibility.  Where prairie society had the opportunity to create something new, they did not step very far from Old World cultural and social norms.  Some interesting possibilities, like grain marketing cooperatives and universal health care programs, were to emerge on the prairies, but any substantial impact this landscape would have on the emerging society was limited by an inability to see beyond cultural conditioning and old loyalties.

Source: Saskatchewan Archives Board

Often, I wonder what Saskatchewan would have been like if our European immigrant ancestors had stayed living in their Hobbit-style sod homes, allowing the native landscape and the ways of indigenous cultures to overwrite them, and us in turn. In many ways, we’ve been stuck in an old frame of mind, limiting ourselves here on the prairies, and throughout most of the country as well.

This year, Weyburn is celebrating its 100th year as a city, and not that long ago our province celebrated its centennial.  We’re a young society, but a century of trying to solve the wrong problem–how to be like eastern Canada, or Europe–has been like us managing Malcolm Gladwell’s bomb problem.  Occasionally we do hit the pickle barrel and it has impact.  But in the end, do we ever ask ourselves ‘where is the pickle barrel?’  We need to start asking ourselves what we’re doing.  When it comes to living on this landscape, have we even begun to adapt as fully as we can?  Are we trying to solve the right problems for us?

2011 TED Talk, Malcolm Gladwell, The strange tale of the Norden bombsight

http://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell.html

Breaking Up

I never want it to come to this, but here we are, at the end.

It’s the natural cycle.  Try to accept it.

Full moon rising.

Next morning’s sunrise.

I saw it yesterday, the inevitability of change. I saw the future in the shrinking snow. The signs were there in the tendrils of melt water slipping down the concrete drive. This morning, watching the sun burn the underside of clouds, I saw a pair of coyotes jogging in the back way.

Yes, the solitary coyote had company. A few minutes later, the hare that lives in the field behind the house came bounding across the snowy creek bed, the movement of his black ear tips against the white snow the only thing to give him away (that will soon change). He was flushed by a third coyote not stopping to spare a glance at fleeing breakfast; coyote paused later, sniffed the air, and resumed pursuit of his own kind.

This is spring in the wild. Hunting, chasing, pairing, mating, and exposure of all things beneath that winter kept covered these past months.

I also saw this yesterday: pacing house wives. Restless women—followed by little children barely able to walk—stalking something unknown along the roads, sniffing the air. When the women met up with each other they stopped to exchange words, edgy and ill at ease, quickly pulling away from each other.

Later in the fall, when everyone has tallied their winter earnings and  established ranks, they will be calm.  These women will travel together in a pride of LuLuLemon-wearing, stroller pushing femmes au foyer that circle the neighbourhood. They parade to demonstrate the shifts in status, their new coalitions and hierarchies. They go out to emphasize who has been included. Who is not. And new Gucci sunglasses.  There will be a return to pretenses of friendship, brittle alliances that are born of place. It takes no special skills of perception to see that they are not friendly now.

The decaying ice.

It’s nearly time. Break up. The men will be home in two or three weeks. This is likely the last shift on the oil rig for workers who have spent more of the winter away than at home. Valentine flowers hinted at it—those assertive messages of masculine return—but as the spent carnations hit the trash, an uncertain anticipation edges into the aura of my younger, female neighbours.

After more than a dozen years in oil towns, I’ve come to admit that my husband is right: spring is the worst season of the year. It is painful at the start, in these days of freeze and thaw. It throbs harder with the men’s return when the ground becomes too wet to move rigs and drill for oil. The neighbourhood will be flushed with a carnival of parties and spending sprees, departures and returns for vacations that can be embarked upon only if the taxes (due April 30^th ) are deferred a while longer. It will be weeks of new toys, new trucks, new clothes, and booze. This is oil patch on a spring break-up bender. This is what natural selection looks like, the weeding out of who can make it in oil, and who cannot. What follows is the part that hurts the most.

Three weeks later the first bills arrive in the mail. There will be no pay cheque among the envelopes.

Trickling down.

Conflict. Arguments. They can erupt anywhere. Outside the school on a parent night. In the grocery store. On the street. Doors slam. When the ground heaves and settles with the freezing and thawing of spring, cracks show in the surface of all things that winter had covered. Melancholy sets in, and for some, this will be the trigger. Addiction, legal issues, divorce. Suicide.

I hate this time of year.

This kind of stress doesn’t define everyone here.  Not all oil field workers come to their jobs with the burdens of hidden stresses nipping at them.  Not everyone is broken by spring’s idle hours and lack of billable hours.  I want to be clear about this.

I also want to say that for those who struggle, the pattern is not unique from one place to the next.  I’ve seen these behaviours before, in other towns. It was like this in northern Alberta, in a city where we lived called Grande Prairie. I saw the same cycles in the central Alberta city of Red Deer, although we didn’t stay long.  We moved through break up to the next job. It happens in the smaller places, too.

For my husband, who banks his holidays to use in spring because he hates working in the mud, there is no real down time to his work. I’ve always appreciated that we could connect to something other than the swing of a missing pay cheque in spring, to feel foremost the presence of nature in seasonal changes. This seemed important to teach our children, who have grown up in the oil field but who haven’t been defined by it.

Uncovered.

On the farm, spring meant simple things like prairie crocus blooming. Warmth meant tiny grey paws budding along a willow branch. The rich scent of compost in the soil. In town, especially in a rigging neighbourhood, this is the time of year when three-in-the-morning fighting punches at the darkness outside. Grievances among jealous friends rupture, and a man beats his garage door to death. Winter affairs creep out into the open.

Break up. Nearly bankrupt, broke. Breaking the land. (Mental break down.) Winter composting and decay. Homesteading metaphors mix with my emotions. Is this a journey about getting past the tangle of roots beneath, going below into something deeper? I suspect I should seek fertile soil, be creative.

Sharp edges, shrinking snow.

This will be our last oil patch break up. My husband will be retiring from field work this summer. Because this is the last year, I am going to pay attention, soak in the details.  I’m not going to politely turn away.

With so much snow it will be months before the land is dry again.  The municipal government is raising taxes city-wide this spring.  It’s going to be a difficult season.  It will be difficult to watch without flinching, without a flush of embarassment as a husband and wife beat each other with words, teaching their young children a vocabulary they cannot use at school. But I want to see if I can understand. And I want to write about it, with compassion.

Intersection of Place, Time, and Person

I watched the Opening Ceremonies of the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Games sitting on a hotel room bed in Yorkton, Saskatchewan. As I listened to Canadian actor Donald Sutherland read a passage from W.O. Mitchell’s novel, Who Has Seen the Wind, I was struck by the odd and unexpected connections people share in this world. I was nestled in hotel-bed pillows, snuggled by my husband and two daughters, both of whom were entranced by the hype of the Olympics.

We were travelling to Weyburn from where we were living at the time, on a farm in west-central Saskatchewan, near a town called Unity. The girls and I were anticipating our first glimpse of our future home. My husband had been insisting that the place was nothing special, just the regular old stock of buildings:  hotels and restaurants, a jumble of houses.

north of Weyburn

Despite his insistence that the landscape was flat boring nothingness interrupted by ordinary boring usual-ness, the Olympic vision of Weyburn prairie was a siren-call: Donald Sutherland crooned of the prairie that Mitchell had made famous in his writing, while the two-coloured image of cobalt-blue and deep yellow like turmeric portrayed sky and earth.

The February night that we spent in the Yorkton hotel the temperature dropped to be the coldest night of the 2009-2010 winter. Late the next afternoon we arrived in Weyburn, passing into the threshold of the city at the time of day when the sun, previously a burning glare, diminished into dusk.  The cold flatness of the light swallowed the horizon.

The approach to little city seemed endless, as though Weyburn drew away from us, receding into a hollowness of grey snow and sky.  It appeared the unlikeliest of shelters.

north of Weyburn, about a quarter mile away

I felt as if reality were shrinking away from me as well. If there is an intersection of Karma, or a knot of serendipity, then Weyburn is that place.  I was receiving my first warning:  W.O. Mitchell, Canadian writer, had come from Weyburn; T.C. Douglas, founder of Canada’s modern health care system, had been here.  And now, we were here.

Tommy Douglas’s former son-in-law is Donald Sutherland, who had read the passage of Mitchell’s writing at the opening ceremonies of the Olympics the day before.  All these little prickles of coincidence of time, place, and people, seemed to whisper something.

It was one of those moments, like when the dog catches a strange scent in the air and her hair rises, unbidden, straight off her back. I felt the same. A strange scent, an odd crossing of signs that really meant nothing in terms of real-world consequence, but still, it prickled the hair on the back of my neck.

If the embedded video doesn’t work, you can watch the video at YouTube.

Accidents

These bowls were made with pieces of clay cut from a slab and placed in a mold. We used coils on the inside of the bowl which were smoothed to create a solid ‘lining’ for the interior of the bowl.

My experiment with pottery came to an end soon after we moved out of the camper and into the house. The last time I drove home from class at the studio I slid through ice and snow, feeling a little terrified all the way down south hill, where at the bottom 3^rd Street intersects with busy Highway 39 then crosses the Souris River. I made it through and got to the house, no longer empty but filled with packed boxes.

The movers had brought our things two days earlier, and I had left pottery class early that day to help my husband set up temporary walls to close off the garage that still had no doors. It was mid-October in 2010 and I felt incredibly lucky that the cold waited that year. The night had brought the first hard and lasting frost of winter, which turned into freezing rain and snow in the afternoon. We still had no front steps into the house—just the rickety structure used by the builder—and I was grateful that the moving company had called to tell us that they could improvise with ramps. We had things in storage that couldn’t freeze.

My family and I took over the house on Canadian Thanksgiving weekend, a week before the movers came and my class ended. On Friday the water was turned off at the campground, and on the same day our toilets were installed at the house. I remember that one of the water lines connecting to a toilet leaked and there was water on the basement floor when I arrived. The tradesman who installed the furnace was finishing his work in the house, and told me what happened. He said he called the plumber to come back and fix it, so it was good, but also complained that the plumber never checked his connections. I cleaned up the water on the floor as he talked.

Little fingers make little pinch pots: my daughters’ hand built finger bowls.

At this point in my story, I have lived in Weyburn for almost two months, and my family and I have met many people who are struggling with the same problems we have with housing. There are others living in campers, trying to get a house to buy or an apartment to rent. Others are crammed in with relatives or commuting to Weyburn from Regina or Moose Jaw each day for work. It is a seller’s market:  nice houses rarely come up for sale and if they appear on the Multiple Listing Service they are very expensive; poorly maintained homes are easier to come by and cheaper, but are well beyond over-priced.

I feel satisfied that my family has a new house to live in, without scary electrical DIY lurking in the walls or mould behind the drywall.  But more than that, we now have running water and a spacious water heater. This means that to get a hot shower in a warm building we don’t need to go to the community pool, at $12 a visit. We have flush toilets connected to the city’s sewer lines, unlimited heat on cold nights, and electricity. And when the movers came, we got furniture and could stop sleeping on the floor. The first two weeks of living in our brand new house was the most  luxurious experience of material comfort I ever had.  Even when the cat walked on my head in the middle of the night, amused by his easy no-bed access, I thought this was wonderful.

The gravy pitcher was wobbly: I learned that I should have pinched the spout rather than pull it to a point.

A week after my clay class ended–and a day after the sewer backed up in the basement–I took the kids to Signal Hill to get our pottery. The snow had melted, the sun was warm again, and the studio was bright and quiet. We carefully packed our pieces and took them home, spread them over the kitchen table and studied each. The colour of the glazes, the shape of the designs, and textures of the finished work is a marvel, with so many surprises. Some of the colours didn’t turn out the way I expected. The red glaze called ‘Ketchup’ is brown. Some of the sharpness of the greenware has been muted by the glaze. All is quite wonderful, really, and the accident of forgetting to re-stir the black glaze has produced a green plate, perfect for the leaf patterns my daughters and I had pressed into it.

The black plate that turned out green.

Small plates made with molds. My daughters enjoyed decorating these and many of the other items.

Plate made with mold. Lace was used to texture the clay.

This guy was my oldest’s child’s darling while we lived on the farm. He inspired her clay relief.