Dear Louise,

     You'd be surprised at how often I think of you.  So I thought I'd sit down and tell you of a good memory I have of you.  I remember when I first saw you in grade 6, at Notre Dame.  You were the new kid in school and you had a certain confidence that comes from moving around a lot.  Your French was very mature and different from our dialect.  I wasn't sure what to make of you and so I kept my distance.  Then one day in class you mentioned to everyone that your brother actually had a stick that a beaver had chewed on!  I was completely enraptured by this idea of possessing such a marvel from nature.  So much so, that I decided to do a big project on beavers and on my cover page, I glued a nickel.  I was impressed by my cleaver ingenuity.  Sadly, the nickel did not return with the paper.  A nickel back in 1972 meant a chocolate fudge sickle!  I blamed Raymond somebody, not sure why.
       All these years later, I find myself thinking of this while canoeing on our lake, doing what I love best - collecting beaver chewed sticks.  The plan is to make an awning off the sauna, completely with this harvest.  Can you imagine something as beautiful as that?  Lately, fat ones have been availing themselves.  So there's a fence waiting to be created somewhere.  Last fall during a gray, cloudy, misty day, a red canoe pulled up with a girl in a yellow rain coat.  She had a gift of many smaller freshly polished beaver chewed sticks for me and she piled them on our dock.  I've made a rustic lattice out of it for the new bed of daisies by the shed.
     This year's big project is an English garden, Yukon style.  For me it's not so much about what we'll plant there, it's the doodads I'm going to have fun with.  A sun dial (ours reads: "Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be"), a memorial bench for my friend and neighbour Gail, a bird bath (made by Gail who was a potter), a funky locally made statue of some kind and an archway made of beaver chewed driftwood.  I've been saving some extra precious ones for the rustic elegance effect, reflecting far away lands, yet terraced in front of the guest cabin.  This is where I'll pass to deliver freshly made sourdough muffins, neatly tucked into a willow basket, to hang on an old paddle wheeler's pulley, dangling off their deck.  Nothing says "Good morning and welcome to Crag Lake!" better than that.  "We're glad you're here to catch a glimpse of this wild setting and to be part of what we are literally carving out of it."
     I'm not sure where these massive ideas come from but Rob, this talented marvel of a man continues to manifest them for me and with me.  I am truly blessed in so many ways.
     Do you ever wonder about things like that?  How we recognize parts of our future selves at a young age and then finding ourselves exactly there?  There's a deja vu effect, or a comforting confirmation about choices made and certain directions taken.  That's the beauty of this decade of being 50.

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.