The Label Quest

My grand vision of having a tiny retreat in our back yard was to not only share this amazing and inspirational natural space but to also bring me varied stories in the form of wonderful visitors from many different corners of the world.  I figured in my future years, I'd slow down on my personal adventures yet still want to travel vicariously with our guests.  So far we have not been disappointed by the many unique, charming and charmed characters who have managed to find us.

Our latest guest is Dirk Rohrbach, www.weltgeschichten.com a German adventurer here to write a book on his latest tour paddling to the Bearing Sea in a birch bark canoe he made himself last summer.  Dirk is a good sport who had no trouble humouring me with sending out an alert to his many followers that I was in need of clothing labels to finish my next label quilt.  Many people responded and yesterday I received my first significant contribution in the mail from L.A.  The challenge is to receive 500 labels during his stay here, until April 3.  The official count so far is 79, mostly thanks to Britta.  Many of them I've never seen before.

So Dirk and I are hoping to drum up more to reach our goal.  Later today, I'll be visiting him with my seem ripper in hand.  His generosity has no limits, he's letting me take all his labels!

Much gratitude to Dirk and his many friends!  I'll keep you posted.

The English Garden

 

"Bloom where you are planted" 

Few subjects subdued and quieted her;

big ones like the state of the world, loss of humanity

where we've all turned cold, afraid,

heavily guarded, overly stimulated,

presenting well.

Other thoughts were hedonistic, open, accessible, 

approachable, coital;

embracing of all encompassing juices of existence.

Photo: Royal Roads, Victoria, B.C. from our courting days. This was the garden shed door 

and is now the main inspiration for our future English Garden.

Scattered

 

"The true traveler is she who goes on foot and even then,

 she sits down a lot of the time."

- Colette

 

She seemed scattered at first,

that's 'cos she was, in almost every way.

Still, she liked to think she had it where it counted.

She came from Africa, Acadia, South America;

from the divorce-land of domesticity,

colour schemes and coordinates.

Living in a back pack suitcase

carrying water with him,

 even after the traumas.

She grasped what it was to be displaced,

uprooted;
expulsed from home.

Muse written when we first found a place to be for a while, after being on the road a long time.

My Mexican Parka

Photos: with Ros Oberlyn on the Malecon, La Paz, Mexico & Crag Lake parka

 
During my brief stint as an inn keeper in Baja, three winters ago, I had one of those amazing Yukon coincidences.  One of my neighbours said there was a woman who liked to winter in La Paz who also had a Yukon connection.   So when she walked past the inn a few weeks later, I had a vague recollection of her smiling face.  For anyone living in the Yukon in the late 1980's, Ros Oberlyn would be a familiar sight since she was a CBC TV reporter.  Turned out she had an apartment on the next block from me.  Most memorable all those years ago was Ros' outside winter stories because she wore a stunning purple and red beaded parka.  This may have been one of the first things I asked her once I found out that soon she would take up permanent residence in Mexico "What will become of your parka?"  We negotiated the repatriation of the parka back to the north under a polka-doted palm tree while eating rose pedal and corn ice cream.  Quite a surreal and lovely memory.

Soiled Glass

The sun has returned to us.  Living in this deep valley has it's dark sides literally and for a few weeks in winter we don't see the sun directly.  But lately it's been blasting in, showing us all the accumulated dust on the logs and surfaces.  Who has time to address that, I figure, especially since our vacuum is indisposed for the moment.  I'd much rather admire the light shinning thru what my friend Wendy calls, my 'soiled glass' window.  It's an inspiration of hers that I adopted last summer and now I reap the rewards.  She says she can't afford a real stained glass window, so instead she has a collection of coloured antiques and thrift store finds at her window.  She uses these items regularly and rotates the colours to change the mood and the style of her entire kitchen.  I really like that idea of function, creativity and environment combined.  For up to 2 hours a day now, the southern exposure of the sun shines directly and I'm not wasting such a warm bath on dust but capturing it ever so briefly in old soiled glass.

Each piece hold a souvenir too; the old Sprite bottle discovered in my brother Pierre's yard while digging for the new landscape on Vancouver island.  The small red pitcher from Rob on my 50th birthday, a fancy hand blown antique; the broken red measuring cup that Wendy couldn't part with after the tragedy; the odd purple bottle from a huge antique shop in a barn in Ontario near the farmhouse Rob grew up in; the glass chicken from my Memere's kitchen in Cocagne, N.B.; the amber '70's vintage candy bowl from a garage/estate sale, another reminder of adventures with Wendy.

Flaming Vacuum Cleaner

Photo: Label quilt #1, produced as a form of meditation while in college, 2004 - 2006

On New Years Eve, Rob was eager to welcome the warmer weather so he could clean out the wood stove.  It needed a thorough scrubbing from the roof as well as below.  In his estimation, this requires a vacuum cleaner but in winter it's a bit more challenging with the odd errant ember.  Soon the cabin was filled with thick smoke, cussing, and the scent of burning dust and plastic.  The funny thing about this flaming vacuum cleaner, after the initial rush to get the thing outside and the place aired out (again thanks to above zero temperatures) is remembering that we originally rescued it from the dump 11 years ago, when we first moved here.

And now, back to -30 C, we watch the ice form again on the inside window sills and the hinges on the door.  Billows of frosty air wafts in every time the door opens.  Everything outside has an extra crispness to it and the cabin makes loud creaking thud sounds.  Once in a while, the lake too will give us satisfactory groans, pings and moans, while it adjusts to it's new colder environment.  It's hard to explain why we love this life really.  It's not an intellectual thing but a serious matter of the heart.

Like most cabin dwellers in winter, we read adventure, gardening and cook books, and experiment with new exotic recipes.  We keep fit by shoveling, skiing, and snowshoeing.  Rob likes to feed sunflower seeds to his critters at the feeders by the windows.  In their excitement, the grouse beaks and chickadees throw the seeds on the ground, feeding a lively colony of squirrels that have dug tunnels under the snow.  We could watch this action for a long time.

For me winters is a creative time when I take on wild projects like hand sewing a full size quilt made entirely of clothing labels.  I also made one out of doilies but it wasn't as satisfying.  I'm now finishing up a second label quilt and I'm seriously scrounging for more labels.  Any assistance in this matter would be hugely welcomed.  Labels are fading out, especially the embroidered ones I cherish, which I'm told are mostly silk.  Imagine that, I'm able to say I have a silk quilt that cost me nothing, just thousands of hours of labour!

Add garlic, chocolate, our own blend of Crag Lake coffee and global music blaring (the latest favorite is "Pacifika", a juicy Latino/Canadian blend). Well, there you have it, our formula for a sweet life on a frozen Yukon lake.

My friends Scheherazade and Ana-Maria

 

Photo: Ana-Maria and I at the cabin, June 2006, my grad

There are some people you meet in life you just know will be remarkable from the start.  To be part of their lives, though on the periphery, has been a powerful joy and delight for me.   Soon I'll be seeing them again. Would you like to meet them too?  See below...

Ana-Maria was a Dutch volunteer working with the same organization in Ecuador when we met her in the mid '90's.  She was coming down a set of office stairs when I first spotted her and she greeted me with open arms, like she knew we'd be friends for decades.  I was instantly drawn to her take-charge style and boisterous humour.  When Rob and I were struggling in Guayaquil (once referred to as the ugliest and most dangerous city in South America) and about to pack the whole adventure in, she found us an adobe house over a river in what was to become the most beautiful city in the world for me - Cuenca, where she was living.  This move extended our stay for a few more years, and they were by far, the richest.  I cried when we left there.

When we moved back to the Yukon, Ana-Maria came for an extended visit to sort out what was next for her.  She'd been unable to fit in again to her regular life back in Holland.  Like us, it felt like everything had been changed forever.  After two months, she made a declaration from our hammock in the living room (which was our only piece of furniture in Cuenca), "I had to come to the Yukon to find out that my life will be in Guatemala."  And off she went, to quite her job, to sell her house and all her assets, to fund this primal urge.  It must have been the ultimate test to be stranded for a stint at the Amsterdam airport, leaving everything she knew for certain behind, about to launch into a fresh new adventure, on September 11, 2001.  "Didn't you feel like it was a sign to go back? Weren't you afraid to go on?  You were in limbo, there was so much uncertainly!" I asked.  "No, to me it was confirmation that I was doing exactly the right thing."  This sums up Ana-Maria quite well.

I first met Scheherazade/Arlaine in Antigua, on a cobbled stone street.  She was limping mildly and her head was bent in serious concentration.  When she spotted Ana-Maria and I approaching her, her face burst open with stories of her recent fall and her determined ideas about life.  I took notice of her unusual spirit right away.  Arlaine once described herself as a starlet when she was young but the course of her life was altered by the reform school she was sent to.  I'm not exactly sure what a starlet is but I know it involves poise and presence, which is still vibrantly visible.  As was true of Scheherazade, Alaine's stories shaped who she is today.  During my month in Guatemala I watched these two amazing women formulating and creating their new existence there, each with their individual projects in mind, going forward.

Several years later, while recuperating from surgery (on a futon Rob had cobbled together for me out of logs punched out of the guest cabin windows), I got a call from Ana-Maria and Arlaine.  They were on a white beach in Mexico thinking and scheming with me in mind.  Would I be interested in spending a winter in La Paz, running Arlaine's small inn while she concentrated on the building of her project in Guatemala? Well, let me think about that...  A few months later Arlaine picked me up in L.A. and like it was perfectly normal, we drove down the Baja road, fueled on tuna salad and many more stories.

Arlaine's latest update:  http://cpss.wistia.com/m/sn10bX  
Arlaine's website:  www.ninosdellago.org

Ana-Maria:  www.losninos.info