MUSKOKA BLOG
The old homestead has a wonderful mantle of sparkling white, now that we’ve had the first significant snowfall of the late autumn season. Most of the autumn, it seems, has been spent, rather invested, in many writing projects that have been on the back burner for months and even years. Writers are an odd bunch. Back in my younger days, sitting in front of that old manual underwood, with the fancy scroll work and loud, significant tap, I could write just based on circumstance. It afforded me the vehicle to create, and I was prolific to beat the band. Today it takes a lot more it seems, to pull off the jags of yore, when I might write four or five hours most days. Physically speaking, I can’t handle the same hours. I’m old just not quite so feeble. That’s coming!
Although I played hockey for a lot of years, from about seven years of age onward, and suffered many injuries over the decades, the most injurious activity for the body has been sitting at this keyboard, and all the other keyboards in the past. My wife Suzanne criticizes my posture and I’m pretty sure she’s right about my slouching. I haven’t filmed myself hunched over the keyboard but she does tend to walk through my office from time to time......and observance is her hobby afterall.
I have been willing to endure the aches and pains of long writing jags, just to get a couple of new sites up and running before the end of 2009. One is particularly near and dear to me.......a blog and web site devoted to our hobby of collecting handwritten recipes. Suzanne and I have been collecting these excellent relics of cookery heritage for years but it hasn’t been until the past two years, that we’ve been able to make sense of where it was all going to lead.....we’ve got many hundreds now dating back to the 1850's. Most of the collection represents the Muskoka region, where we regularly hunt and gather collectibles. What began as a happenstance meeting.....falling out of old books we had purchased at auction and estate sales, has turned into a full scale devotion to finding more, explaining what we do have, networking a tad, and trying to broaden our horizons in cookery heritage generally. You can check up on our work by visiting the sites listed with this blog site. It will be the subject of a year long feature column starting this February 2010 in Curious: The Tourist Guide. You can find where it is available by searching online.
The newest blog site for me is my favorite.....because it has been brewing in me since the Christmas season of 1977, the year I finished my studies in Canadian history, at York University, in Toronto, and moved back to my hometown, Bracebridge, Ontario. Filled with vim and vinegar it was only a few months back home when I helped launch a family collectible business, called Old Mill Antiques, and helped establish the fledgling Bracebridge Historical Society, which would go on to found Woodchester Villa and Museum. But what I began writing about was the Muskoka landscape. I used to take long winter ski ventures, that winter season of 1977-78, and instead of hauling the materials the artist would have slung over the shoulder, I took notepaper and pencils to capture the winter scenes in the backwoods. I have always dreamed of being an artist but alas, there has always been a shortfall of patience and of course limited talent. I began writing landscape sketches instead of painting them, and it was perfect for the non-artist to feel part of the creative enterprise, even if it didn’t produce a single saleable art panel. I’ve used portions of my landscape pieces, from that vintage, in hundreds of feature articles, and in two early books I wrote back in the 1980's. So I decided it was time to produce a site where I can finally release the hounds, so to speak, and publish the current landscape work I’m hunched-over at present. While I’m no longer residing in Bracebridge, I’m still very much in the Muskoka woodlands here in Gravenhurst, where our wee bungalow rests on the north side of a wetland, a moor we call The Bog. This is a special location to my wife and I, and all our neighbors here, poignantly so, due to the fact it was nearly sold-off by the town several years ago for a new housing development. We stopped it. The only way I can explain how important this 20 acre site is, to me in particular, is via these landscape sketches published on the blog site . Please take a peak at my newest entries. I’m quite proud of the fact I’ve acted upon a 33 year old ambition. Now if only I could paint. I’m going to give that a whack in the new year.
As we near the Christmas holidays, and I’m divided between another four dandy research and writing projects, I wish now to extend our family’s best wishes for a wonderful and festive season with all the trimmings. Ours will be humble and quiet as usual but always inspired by these beautiful woodlands of Muskoka.