MUSKOKA IN TRANSITION - A LOVER OF THE CHANGING SEASON, I SURRENDER

I have only just now arrived home, after a refreshing jaunt with pet in tow, over to the woodland across the lane…..the restorative wild place, with the well trodden path that winds with obscured corners, down into the frozen hollow of The Bog. I have sat here today, at this keyboard, looking longingly out my frosted office window pane, thinking it a sort of punishment, to be inside, and not ambling down the lane toward some type of profound, natural enlightenment. I have vowed every few moments of pause, to grasp up the dog leash, and take Bosko for a walk. As a writer, my greatest fear, other than getting too lazy to walk at all, is that I might interrupt an important story-line, or rich new vein of creative enterprise, by taking a break. It keeps me here confined far too long, but unfortunately it has been a life-time relationship with angst about failing, disappearing inspiration.

Each time I arrive at the pause I've been hoping for, the right punctuation to meet the perfect state of preparedness, I don my jacket, my most comfortable strolling shoes, and call my faithful partner to my side. Today provided a wonderful environs to wander through the smoky woodlands, and although the heavy fog of earlier has long since dissipated, there is still a hazy horizon, that makes this place so wonderfully haunted and alluring to the writer in its midst. For much of the day, I occupy that chair by the window, and tap on that contraption upon the desk that you can only barely make-out in silhouette. When the weather is vicious, and the rain and sleet smack at the window pane, as if to slap the voyeur to attention, I tremble a wee bit, at the thought of being in harm's way of raging autumn storm. Even the dog, curled on top of my feet, will, on these days, hearing the wind beating at the old house, politely but insistantly decline a walk until later……when wind and rain abate.

Yet there is only so much you can experience visually, and I feel absolutely compelled to immerse myself in the landscape environs about which I write so frequently, and am absorbed so deeply. My moods are very much tied to the prevailing conditions here, and when the winter turns on its charm, there is a definite bundling of observational affections, moreso than the typical wanderlust allure of those sun-bathed, early fall days, when standing on the brink of the hollow is warm and restorative. Today has been one of those days, and I regret not having ventured out more often, and sooner, as it is warned, that the end of the week will bring a new stormfront and possibly the first snow of the fledgling season.

I have written in alcoves on quiet beachfronts in Florida, on the fringe of Robin Hood's forest in Nottingham, England, from a nook in old Toronto, old London, and on the shores of the Muskoka lakes, where gentle lapping of the water, paced my copious notes, made about the truly great places on earth to wax poetic. But it is this place, above the Gravenhurst moor, that I have invested most of my time, watching over these enchanted woods and frost-silvered bullrushes, that waver, like willows in an English meadow, by the scented sweep of gentle air from horizon hill to sunlit pasture. I have found an inspirational place to work. I am home. I have a dog wrapped around my feet, and two cats now stretching on my lap…..the other is sitting up on the window sill, swatting at water droplets falling on the other side of the glass.

There is no danger, actual or perceived, of running out of things to write about, here at Birch Hollow, tucked so pleasantly into the ever-fascinating lakeland of South Muskoka.