Today The Bog is definitely Thoreau’s Walden


I’d like to withdraw today to a modest cabin by a picturesque pond, and write all the live long day. I’d like to leave the harried folks who push and shove, tailgate and argue, and keep company with the critters who come and go with nary a concern I might be in their way. I will not have one argument here. Not one difference of opinion. And if I was swallowed whole by a bear, it would be infinitely better than having a heart attack at the grocery store, battling fellow shoppers for the last packages of sale-priced pork. Yes indeed, it would be so much better to mulch into this hinterland paradise, my notepad and pen still employed at the final summation, than the futile attempt I make daily, to fit into this frenzy of humanity. I could easily become a hermit. Would you bring me supplies?
Thoreau’s sister used to bring him fresh baking to tide him over at Walden Pond.
There are many times now in this seemingly fatal period of mid-life grumpy, rising as a matter of conscience almost every work week, when I need to “Thoreau-ly” refresh myself, about what truly matters and what doesn’t to the “nose-to-the-grind” writer-kind. What is important enough to write about, and what is quite necessary, for sanity’s sake, to ignore of this modern day hubbub of commerce and exploitation, progress and transformation as rule of order. If you’ve read many of the previously published blogs, posted over this past winter season, you will most certainly recognize the parallel between Thoreau’s retreat to Walden Pond, and my hiatus periods staring out over The Bog here in my Gravenhurst neighborhood.
I have arrived as the downtrodden on this brink of topography, just a hair’s breadth above a tiny crystalline rapids, along the black snaking creek below, with a block of sheer, sharp-edged hate as my burden. I’ve stood here so frustrated with people, places and things that I could have belched a fire stream across the entire expanse of lowland. I could have, with an unholy roar, emptied the valley of all existence. And I have stood here and felt the anger and frustration slip away as if I was but a melting candle, wick to foot, disappearing into a vapor to leave nary a trace of any angry existence.
I have always thought of The Bog as Walden Pond, where I, like the writer Thoreau, could hole-up for a period, a moment or an hour, to truly exhale all expectations, particularly that preponderance of responsibility, the tithe to that modern day mantra of “more is good,” and it is “good to have more than any one else!”
Leaning up against this tall pine at my back, and listening to the soothing spring wind wash through the needles, and the trickle of water over these tiny cataracts, is both heaven and sanctuary for the writer under burden. This scene, this actuality, is of striking revelation. It would be a sin to ignore this heaven on earth. This outreach of salvation! This gracious and life-restoring place reminds one so clearly of mortality, and how fragile our continuance in partnership, particularly on clear days when the sound of chainsaws and earth-movers prevail above the crickets and peepers, the waterfalls and windsong through these endangered evergreens.
There is an enchanting cascade of sun this afternoon, falling in a funneled golden mist of diamond light that attaches to my weary old soul. The warmth and calm of this humble place, slowly brings the heart back to pulse, the spirit back to reckoning, the eyes to clear sight. The voyeur might get giddy with all this frivolous rekindling. The madness of the moderns evaporates away. I have reverence for every wildflower, each tadpole, and the vast array of mysteries I long to quest.
I will awaken in the wee hours in a sweat, having dreamt of The Bog being bulldozed, and feel so ecstatic upon awakening, to find its hauntingly charming silhouette starkly true against the moonlight, framed as art by my bedroom window. I can not imagine what it would be like instead, to rise to a nightmare fulfilled.
We all need to protect our respective Walden Ponds. Muskoka.

A More Passionate Embrace of the Good Life

This morning I am truly torn as to whether I should climb into the truck and just drive and drive into the heart of a truly amazing May day. Instead of hunkering down at this keyboard, the sun patching the floor of my office like a strewn quilt-top, I should be questing out and lusting beyond this humble burg, seeking I suppose the meaning of life. My wife Suzanne would suggest something like, “Do you mean after all these years and all the questing you’ve done you still don’t know the meaning of life?”
I suppose it’s true. My opinion changes pretty regularly these days. Depending on the latest news reports from the war-zone, the late-breaking media coverage filming the most recent casualties caused by terrorist attacks, the bold headlines revealing our cities in mayhem and the horror-filled actuality of imminent environmental catastrophe. There’s an ever-expanding self-serving attitude these days that one should simply, and selfishly “live for the moment,” and let the future manifest with all its fury. If you can’t stop it, then ignore it! Maybe it’ll just go away. There are other folks I know who spend most of any given day depressed about all the negatives facing the human race, both from nature’s wrath to citizen on citizen treachery. All the horrors of all the world do seem to befuddle plans for being fancy-free for long. Rapidly escalating gas prices are giving revised meaning to “foot-loose,” because that’s about all I can afford these days. I don’t really mind except for the fact I do need to travel for my antique business or it would surely quagmire into the same-old-same-old and subsequently fail financially. I’m then quickly reminded that without a life-sustaining environment who in the hell needs antiques?
When I began writing as a plan toward profession, I had just entered my first year of university in Toronto. I can remember wandering through the York University library feeling as a writer should. I was inspired by everything and every one. It was a cherished thought that one day I would write some tome so significant that the librarian would fight to get a first edition for these same bookshelves that so impressed the fledgling author.
Well, I’m still trying to write something or other that will eventually make that library-relevant grade but it’s not looking good. Not because I haven’t composed an impressive volume of text but that most of my efforts have been spent on newspaper and feature publication copy, and a minor amount of time spent on five locally produced books involving matters of local heritage. It’s not that I don’t want to write something worldly and amazingly insightful to warrant a hardcover binding, but my passion for more regular, even immediate exposure to the public has been all-consuming. My attention span suits short pieces. I might be able to write a collection of short stories but would fail at any attempt to compose a weighty novel.
When I began at the community press back in 1979, having my work appear weekly was a treat. While authors were penning text daily, for a period of from one to five years for a single book, I was being presented to the public every week. When I began writing for several other publications from the same newspaper group, I was feeling chipper about the ground-swell of enthusiasm regarding my work. I was getting pretty popular by the mid 1980’s and I would have an average of five to ten articles in each publication by the end of that decade. I was still broke, there were no book deals, and I was starting to get death threats because I was being forced to cover more hard news in the district, ranging from cases of impaired driving, business frauds, the police beat, and court coverage of everything from rape to murder. As I had begun as a feature writer with some coverage of local municipal affairs, I was moving up in the reporting world and it agreed with me. For awhile!
In one day I would write a hockey game summary of local minor league play, compose a story to cover the events of the horticultural society’s general meeting, type up some notes from the council meeting the night before, follow the fire engines on a traffic accident call, pen a local real estate feature story, and finish up another installment of an historical series,….. which of course I was most partial to if forced to select a greatest area of interest. One day, sitting at my desk, I zoned into a writer’s oblivion (a frequent happy-place hiatus from newsroom stuff) for about a half hour trying to figure out what the hell had happened to my quest for the holy grail. The meaning of life. How was it that I had come to this end. Instead of writing books that a university librarian would want to acquire, I was producing massive amounts of space filler generally, and most of it created at a keyboard like this without a shred of enthusiasm. It was in the year 2000 that I decided to quit the mission to fill the white space between the ads for our local publications. Sure, my name is still abundantly well represented here and it’s not likely I shall be forgotten any time soon for the pieces they loved and the ones they loathed. If you’re a local or family historian you will undoubtedly be using portions of my published research some time in the future. There’s a lot of archive’s articles with my byline attached. I’m proud of this but frankly it hasn’t answered my question, after all the ink expended. I’m not much closer to understanding the meaning of life than when I began asking the question as a university student with a long life to quest for an answer. At 52 years of age, I think it’s about time I knew something more about this purpose of life situation than I do!
When I wander out into this small neighborhood, bordered by this modest but thriving woodland with all its leaning old birches and gnarled evergreens, creatures and insects interacting all the live long day, I do believe it to be the conduit to that holy grail of considerations. I confess to withdrawing into the woodlands more and more these days because even the half solitude of an urban green-belt is better than tarmac and congestion I detest. Knowing that so much of our hinterland is in danger from capitalist “live for today,” land-sharks, and pollution from a gazillion sources, in concert with the eco-disaster of climate change, I feel compelled to visit these woods much more frequently, as a loved one visits a dieing companion….reluctant to visit because we fear the truth demise may come soon, heart-broken to leave because it may mark the last visit in the divide between life and death. If it isn’t the gateway to the greater appreciation of this evasive meaning of life, it is as close as I am likely to get. Standing in the bright May sunlight this morning, watching the new sprouts of ferns pushing strongly through the black earth and cover of dead leaves, inspires the poet within to pen something uplifting about the possibilities of regeneration. Maybe we can survive this latest threat to mother earth.
I find this a sacred place. I breathe in its legacy as if it is heavenly perfume. As I watch life new-born here amidst the decay of autumn and winter, what heaven-on-earth it inspires for this frustrated, quest-tortured reporter, feeling the compelling, conflicting forces encountered of any crossroad. It was at the crossroads where guitarist Robert Johnson met the devil, and initiated that deal for a soul. I’m not offering anything as barter, except the last molecule of patience to find the most truth-lined path onward. Or I might stay here forever, and savor the reality that after all these years wandering aimlessly, I still have a few choices yet to make. I might well petrify and become known as the “frozen-in-time writer at the crossroads,” showing fellow travelers, the grim potential of standing too long on the same spot, awaiting the right sign, the right mood, and the most meaningful kick in the arse. Always dutifully awaiting that divine intervention to point……”this way to the meaning of life.”
Undoubtedly I shall write even more newspaper features and a book or two in the meantime, and visit these restorative woods, just in case the future unfolds in story-line…. wrapped through Alice’s Wonderland, around the summer ferns, and wildflower bunches, through the bog and over the hillside, around the pines and squat cedars, to the half fallen fence….that ends at the crossroads, just as it might be said….it begins all over again.
A young woman I know asked me recently about the rewards of authordom. I inquired if she was indecisive at crossroads. “Why,” she asked. “Just wondering,” I responded. “Say, you don’t happen to know the meaning of life do you?”

Plase visit my other blog at gravenhurstmuskokoa.blogspot.com

May Day and some recollections of a rapscallion once

We all at one time or another grapple with the purpose and meaning of our existence on this planet, questing onward and sometimes pointlessly, for tangible reasons to explain beyond speculation, our placement amongst the general population.
Possibly it’s the result of having been a writer most of my life but there are times when I just don’t understand what it’s all about. Particularly now when, at 52, I feel the immensity of challenge, to cram what’s expected of me, by I suppose divine mandate, into the few remaining years of mental and emotional competence…. left to expend on quality of life issues. My biggest dilemma now is to prove to myself, how necessary it is to forward life experience toward some final important objective. Unfortunately after all these years of beating the facts out of life-as-we-know-it, I’m having the toughest time of all, reconciling my childhood in another city with my early life re-location, to another Ontario community. As much as I try, I can not make sense, or progressive union, between my day to day life in Burlington, Ontario, with our family’s move to the Town of Bracebridge, circa 1966.
I will be wandering on some sunny woodland trail here in Muskoka, with nary a care in the world, when all of a sudden l will recall some point of childhood that as God is my witness, could only be caused by spiritual intervention. As if, in fact, it is a message from the so-called “other side,’ (the deceased) that I need to bloody-well pay attention to the important markers of life, I suppose have been inadvertently forgotten. I’m a firm believer in the existence of this “other side,” and I talk under my breath to a lot of departed friends as a sort of validation that they’re still in my heart, and I’m thinking of them day to day in respect of our time spent together. So when I get a flashback about a time and place, a person or situation that may have been inspired by a scent, a spray of light on a woodland floor, a sound or combination of intrusive events, I always wonder if there is some significant string attached that will make sense to a particular reminiscence.
The greatest divide is my years living on Harris Crescent, in the late 1950’s City of Burlington, situated on the shore of Lake Ontario. Today it’s as if it was all just a late night movie and that it wasn’t at all a matter of the Currie kid’s life-actuality. But it was. When I try to talk to my wife and two boys about my days growing up in Burlington, it gets worse, because the more I try to familiarize them with the lad I was, the more fictional it seems to become. The problem of course, is that I haven’t taken them to my old stomping ground on Harris Crescent, a block from Lion’s Club Park and only several urban neighborhoods from Lakeshore Public School.
Yet it’s not as if any memory has faded particularly just that I can’t for the life and spirit of me, put myself believably back to that time period of youth, such that it makes sense today. And there is no other contentious divide or emotional block that I can determine, other than the 1966 motor trip re-location (which was greatly desired), three hours north to the District of Muskoka, where I’ve remained ever since. But for some memorable years, Burlington was my end-all, and the sound of a fog-horn the daily greeting for a boy trundling off to school. I loved my neighborhood then and the wee folk I called friends, like Fred Vandermullen, Robbie Cooper, Johnnie Burtwhistle, Ray and Holly Green, Bobby Crews, Ronny LaRose, Donna Clarke and a girl I adored named Angela who lived in a house that backed onto Ramble Creek. I used to cross over the river, against my mother’s instruction, and play on the swing set with Angela long into the afternoon. When I had to leave she would cry and so would I. When we moved to Mountain Gardens in Burlington, in about 1964, I lost track of all but a few old mates, and when I moved to Bracebridge, in 1966, I kept in contact with Ray and Holly Green, of Courtland Drive, until that finally fizzled into the grand scheme of adult existence and subsequent demands of maturity. It was no longer acceptable to get soakers in Ramble Creek and make googly eyes at dear Angela the sweetest lass of my golden youth.
As a writer I get fairly frustrated these days, trying to wrap around that part of my youth into a modern day relevance. I’m determined to do this but alas, the moral of the story aside, the reason for pursuing messages in the abyss of early memories, isn’t making a whole lot of sense. Yet the void I feel, like sensing a shadowy watcher in the woods, commands me to rebuild the breadth of fact, the bridging of personal history, so that the rest of my family has some fundamental idea I wasn’t born and raised in my easy chair here by the telly.
I want my boys to relay to their offspring one day, how grandfather and his good buddy Ray Green helped their chum George, slide down the school coal chute at recess….and the punishment bestowed bad wee lads in the principal’s office. I escaped the strap throughout the years but poor George me-thinks, wasn’t quite as fortunate. If we’d thought about the consequences we would have known his beige “fake fur” coat was going to catch coal dust like a mop head, and getting the black off our fingers wasn’t going to be easy by the sound of the bell.
I’d like my boys to have known Anne and Alec Nagy, the owners of our building at 2138 Harris Crescent….my second parents……I’ve told my family about the wonderous culinary wizardry that took place in that apartment kitchen, when Anne looked after me while my parents worked in Hamilton. I’ve told my boys especially about the great adventures Ray Green and I had in the Ramble Creek basin, and the many forts and rafts we built over those magical, enchanted years of unbridled youthful imagination.
I remember being scared to a fictional death by the vision of Mrs. White strolling through her lush garden adjacent to our apartment building. She resided on the corner of our street, occupying the charming Victorian house, surrounded by fruit trees, rose bushes and lilacs. To keep me out of her fenced yard I was told by my adult attendants that she was a bonified witch and the garden shed was where she prepared and tenderized the wee ones for the bake oven. I did get over her fence once and on jumping back on side, ripped the arse out of my pants which was a tad hard to explain to my mother Merle.
Merle told me a thousand times not to get into the tunnel below Lakeshore Boulevard that facilitated the watershed of Ramble Creek into Lake Ontario. The water was much deeper from this point onward to the lake, and it was said many young folks had drowned trying to sail away from their respective childhoods. I violated Merle’s law so many times that my friends knew automatically where to find me, if not at any of the other local hangouts. In this forbidden zone I stood on the ledge inside the tunnel and watched the Suckers swimming in the half illuminated golden pools below. It was the limbo separating a child’s ambition and responsible adulthood, that once I was able to brave the rest of the traverse down Ramble Creek to the lakeshore, I could set sail for places across the Seven Seas and sundry other oceans and rivers. I never got the chance. Just when we thought we had built the perfect raft that could be navigated down the creek, designed to clear the shallows and fit through the tunnel under Lakeshore Boulevard, and one that could safely sail upright out into the lake, we bloody well moved away and that was the end of an important dream of liberation from our fetters. I didn’t marry Angela, and Ray and I never sailed to the horizon, touched the moonscape or did even a quarter of what we believed important, and most of my chums became blips on the radar of once, and I always felt kind of bad about that slight of protocol.
Those emotionally charged, high octane days, never fit with the ongoing new realities of a kid in transit. While some kids have had to adapt to many more shifts in residence during their junior years, and a greater span of miles country to country, I still feel a sadness generally that I can’t fit one childhood journal into the binding of the second…. a volume, a generally happy story of a life presumably well spent. I want to make sense, document a logical progression of accepted family history that I’m actually the same kid, with the same parents, same vapor trail from birth in Toronto to middle-age crazy here in Gravenhurst, Ontario, my newest hometown. Maybe you suffer the same disjointed days and ways, and find as much difficulty making those important experiences of once, just as relevant to the modern day chapter, on how to enter old age with submission and tranquility.
I’d be a lot more tranquil for sure if I could one day put the soakers I got in Ramble Creek, on the same level as the soakers I now get wandering through The Bog, here in the Ontario hinterland. These feet have experienced many, many soakers, and while the water course has varied, the experience has always been the same. What a chill feeling of release and freedom then, and now, as water runs between the toes nestled in a muddy sock. Maybe the answer rests somewhere between the sensation of cool water in vessel shoes, and the fact we got them violating the strictest order to stay out of that creek. That creek was the means and route of our eventual emotional escape, make no mistake. Staying out of that water was plain and simply an order impossible to keep. When we set free our small experimental rafts, only one unmanned craft ever made it to the open lake, it was as if we had broken free of the earth’s gravitational pull. But it was the only success we needed, to feel the true, unrestricted flow of vibrant Viking Thule, as an unending adventure ever-more.
Figuring how I got from there to here, from a crush on dear Angela, to a dear wife named Suzanne, well, I’m just a little concerned whether those faded old memories are more fiction than fact, more fantasy than reality….. and if it was real, how will it ever merge, and then why should it, on the next greatest years of my life.
It has become an everso subtle obsession, building the next all encompassing adventure, proving once and for all that linking these point of life’s light,….. heaven’s held a divine plan afterall. I’m still building rafts and planning for new adventures. Heaven knows, I’ll never stop dreaming.

Please visit my other blog at www.gravenhurstmuskoka.blogspot.com

The Picturesque as Haunted –
A scene penned, painted, poeticized

The sweet scented air reminds me of the naturally enticing aroma of Nottingham’s Sherwood Forest. The low mist tumbling over the mounds of matted grasses, might well be the stage-curtain’s opening to reveal the stark, historic English moor. The voyeur even might expect momentarily, to watch either Robin Hood and his Merry Men cajoling by Major Oak (the tree they could hide inside), or see Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, seeking out clues about the Hound of the Baskervilles down in this bog of ours.
This urban green belt tangle is mysterious as always. Even though I’m close enough to the old homestead to yell to my sons or wife, the enclosure, only steps inside, is as if the traveler was miles beyond the bustle of civilization. It is as much like a child reading a story-book. The adventure in story-land begins in earnest, once the choice of titles is selected from the bookshelf. The moment I make my intention known, to all who care that I shall be walking the great beast, Bosko, over to the Bog, my imaginative process commences to concoct and churn, in sincere hopefulness something unusual will be encountered on this latest foray.
Maybe we will cross in front of a deer or two, a wild turkey, a fox or folly of grey squirrels wrestling noisily in the dead leaves. It takes only a few strides down this beaten path to glorify the unanticipated. As Bosko intently studies every scent and wind-inspired knock or creak, I am at the mercy of an unbridled fascination, where indeed it can be said the writer expects it just as likely as a deer or bear, to cross paths with a specter, troll, gnome, fairy, witch or hobgoblin….take your pick. It’s just the way I view life. Escaping into this storied woods, provides a wonderful hiatus from the electronic world I have been unceremoniously dumped by profession. I’m not at all sure I could even muster the energy to type a full page now on a manual typewriter. I don’t remember even once, feeling I needed to escape the keyboard of the old Smith-Corona. If it did cross my mind that the typewriter had a smothering, confining effect over a day’s work, it was certainly not as much then as now.
The spring rain has generated much activity in our neighborhood, particularly noticeable down in the bog where the brown, dry stands of field grasses are slowly being replaced by vivid green plants at their base. It is hard not to feel that same potential in heart half expecting that old bones will strengthen and ambition flow eternal just standing amidst this inspiring, strong, earthly re-generation. I suppose it would be nice if this strong seasonal force could re-shape humanity, as it is now transforming the winter landscape. It is changing daily as the sunscape through the still bare tree-tops warms away the last ground frost, which the oldtimers here claim was down a fair piece in the aromatic bog muck.
I used to reference David Grayson’s writings frequently, from his book, “Adventures in Contentment.” He writes about his stint in farming, having turned his back on city-life in order to preserve his health. He was tilling the field one day when he happened to look up to witness a most impressive sprawling topography beneath a gentle, universal sky, and it seemed to him momentarily, as a strange, unfamiliar scene; one that he knew had been there before, since creation, but in his days at the farm it had never seemed so important to study. The hillside view of the valley below was as if the world had immediately opened to him. When he looked back at his impressively straight furrows created that day, and then contrasted them with what had been provided naturally, he felt foolish about having ignored the bigger picture of life and times. He had been so concerned about making the furrows straight and appearing expertly contoured to the land that he had ignored all the magnificent world and life forces thriving around him. His preoccupation with the task had blocked out all else, the loss being a deprived existence. This bothered him moreso, because it was nature, this sprawling, inspiring landscape and its unlimited possibility, that brought him to the farm in the first place. It was as much an escape as a quest for salvation from city life.
There are times, even as a longstanding student of “Adventures in Contentment,” I find myself immersed in modern day commerce up to my eyeballs, such that I am just as ignorant and blind to the world around me as Grayson complained. It takes a great resolve to stop and admire the view in the course of modern day commerce….modern day hustle. We risk our health and sanity at this mill wheel because we find it impossible to invoke, impose, command change upon our condition. I have had to stop myself many times this past year, to break from the obsession of business at all cost. With exception of these daily walks over to the bog, and down this peaceful country lane, the computer commerce glowing in my office, beckoning me to invest just a few more hours, has been a powerful force to reckon with, and occasionally forcefully escape. It is a terrible reality, one that should never have happened to someone who claims dutifully to being of “the enlightened.” Yet it has happened to millions of folks who have given up entirely on the possibility there is something more in life other than technology….. and straight, perfectly spaced furrows.
When I used to look up from my typewriter keyboard, I might have been privileged to see the lilacs blossoming in the front yard, and the storm clouds blackening along the horizon. I might have looked out in time to see a hummingbird at the feeder, or a squirrel sitting up on the fence post having an afternoon respite. When I look up now I see this wavering white on grey screen, and beyond that is a dark opening of cabinet with an askew wall of books behind. Where the window should be in a visionary’s office! To look out the window at the world around me, I must get up and strain my neck to sneak a little peak out at the front yard, and the bog across the lane. And the humming. My old typewriter made a lot of sounds but all acceptable in the pursuit of story-line. This infernal racket of buzz and internal function, makes me crazy after only a few minutes. I can feel the radiation penetrating my soul. At the old Smith-Corona, the worse symptom was a stiff neck and some ribbon ink on my fingertips from undoing a key jam.
I have to be particularly disciplined at this computer terminal, to step away every half hour or so just to connect with what is real and breathing in this environment around me. Even if I was to stop right now, in the middle of this sentence, and head out the front door and down into the bog, it would take about fifteen minutes to adjust to the new normal. Adjust to the fact there is no sustained humming and neatly boxed, tailored viewpoint ahead. I resisted a computer for many years and only agreed to purchase one as a facilitator of more efficient office operation. It is true that work in both writing and antique professions has become easier in many ways because of computer technology; yet with improvement and efficiency has come isolation and numbness of spirituality. I have been known to sit at this fool contraption for upwards of four hours. When I proof-read what has been composed, it’s quite usual for the work to be flat, sloppily written, and rather lifeless even when read aloud. I put more work into corrections and re-structuring columns and editorials than was ever necessary from the greasy rollers of a manual typewriter.
Even though I have the advice of David Grayson imprinted on my soul, because it is truly what I believe important in life, I fall victim regularly to the modern trappings of the so-called “better-easier-most efficient way” of living and making money. The only salvation is having the determination to pull up from this post, this whiter than white monitor screen (despite enough furrows to make up a day’s work), and wander off into the woods for a brief sojourn from the world as it has been manufactured. I never leave this sanctuary without feeling restored and invigorated. If there is any misery at all in my life, it is the reality of this unhealthy, uninspiring attachment to the modernists’ convention and new century accepted practice of blatant disregard….for anything that doesn’t smack of new technology..
I need these sojourns, as Grayson needed his vista of heaven on earth. I want to kick this habit one day soon, and spend more time haunting these woods, than hovering over a space-age keyboard in half-spirit dreaming of a better way!

Everyone should experience this side of Muskoka – of Ontario – of Canada

You just want everyone to experience this scene. As if it will change opinions and philosophies about earth and its stewardship. Seeing this morning’s first light breaking through the trees is an enlightening span, a subtle, effortless time travel through the ages. From my vantage point on the hillside, overlooking The Bog, the scene unfolding was timeless. This same vista has existed for centuries, and I might just have found myself back in the 1600’s, as in the present domain of this new century. It’s what to me at least, remains so fascinating about these natural places remaining on earth, still largely untouched by progress, yet so precariously on the verge of change to meet the demands of the all-consuming modern-day citizenry.
But you need to see this kind of natural wonder regenerating here, to appreciate the true magnificence of the ever-changing, ever adapting realm of environment. We are humbled in the presence of such grandeur and complexity of life and its powerful forces. Imagine how this one vista, this one tiny bit of wild acreage amidst the urban jungle, will transform in a matter of weeks now, to an almost tropical vegetation of ferns and marsh grasses that will block from view all that is presently clear. Even the black, snaking ribbon of creek that dissects the lowland will be invisible in several weeks, and I will only be able to imagine what the tiny crystalline cataracts will look like, as they gurgle and churn in black pools along the watershed to Lake Muskoka.
It’s at first light that this place is most healing to the weary soul. You can’t stand on this point of land, jutting out above the bog, and not feel in some way invigorated by the way life pushes up from the decay of the past seasons. From these heavy burdens of old brown grasses and fern canopy will generate beautiful new vegetation that will weave like a carpet to the adjacent tree line of evergreens and birches. I could never come away from here, this vigil, and feel uninspired. I’ve arrived at this portal feeling depressed and distressed about life and times, and left again as if granted new wings of flight. I have mired down in self-loathing at this same typewriter and then strolled to The Bog as respite, and been restored to hopefulness that another story-line has been born. I come away with a feeling of calm. My only regret at times likes these, is that I couldn’t stay longer to watch the rest of the day unfold….to be able to watch the tiny rolls of fern unfetter themselves from tight buds into full, rich, deep green sprays that dance tenderly in the sheer poetry of windsong.
You can’t get an environmental conscience overnight, or simply from the lead-stories off the evening news, or from the banner stories in the daily press. You can attend rallies for the environment and commence a new “green” way of living but to be part of this world in earnest, requires a full and committed immersion. Not simply stepping outdoors and then initiating a hasty retreat but actually appreciating the true dynamic of earth and its cycles. Like getting your feet wet in this bog, and truly celebrating the privilege of being part of its life force. Standing here while the new sprouts are breaking through the newly thawed ground. This is where it’s happening. This is the zone that will make you a believer, mother earth is worth saving. If you are not humbled by this scene, or any other immersion in a pasture, a woodland, on a hilltop or down in a bog like this, then you haven’t yet found the meaning of life. It’s here. Right here. To find your place in nature, raise you arms, do a wee twirl if you like, look up, look down and all around, and thank your maker for allowing you this role, this heavenly experience right on earth.
Long before there was a bandwagon to jump upon, in the new century bid to save the environment from its intrusive, “we’ll fix it tomorrow,” human-kind, I was preaching to any one who would listen, about the critical need for outdoor education to immerse youngsters in the real nature of things. I campaigned for years and received nary a nod of approval for my efforts. When I confronted educators about the time and budget of curriculum devoted to technology, computers out-weighing almost everything else in assumed importance, finding a few extra bucks to make outdoor education available to more students each year was simply out of the question. A ridiculous endeavor, they said, to think that students would be better prepared by graduation, having studied from a canoe on an Ontario lake, or hiked the forests and lowlands in quest of the meaning of life. As I made it clear ten years ago, I shall state once again that unless the curriculum wizards get youngsters outdoors more often, and balance outdoor educational opportunity with in-class study, we will continue to launch careers of environmental destruction, instead of graduating good stewards of mother earth.
There is no way to save the environment the way we are going. The massive change necessary requires a sensibility of conduct that seems impossible. Convincing even a public schooler to come and explore this lowland “without a cell phone,” or other, would prove daunting and punitive. Getting a business obsessed adult to step into these woods without some form of technology to interfere, would be next to impossible. Yet it is imperative we get the message across, of just how fragile future existence will be, at the pace of environmental destruction. If indeed we are to save what has already been given a catastrophic blow for all these decades, enlightenment is the only grail that’s holy. If we want to save ourselves, our offspring, we need to re-introduce nature in its deserved light and integrity. Not as a backdrop for our sprawling subdivisions and urban tarmac winding from horizon to horizon. Not viewed as an inconvenience, “an unfavorable weather report” when the conditions turn adverse, offering rain, then snow, then black of night to some mortal’s chagrin….that it all can’t be changed to suit lifestyle pursuits. Designer weather possibly! We are a silly bunch of asses aren’t we, that we have for all these years taken our life force, or sustainability on this planet for granted?
The way to save Muskoka is first of all, to recognize that it is in serious danger of being over-developed by societal craving and greed. The only way to fight this is to see for yourself what is at stake in the next ten years. This lowland, this beautiful, peaceful, life restorative place, might one day soon be the host site of a new condo project, or a recreation centre….maybe a tennis court or sprawling, silly looking bungalows. Instead of these leaning birches and hunched-over evergreens that add so much life and poetry here, we might have street lamps and boulevard signs to point us from here to there.
I don’t make a visit to The Bog at any time of any day that I don’t offer some reservation about leaving, such that I might arrive again to find a bulldozer diverting a waterway for building convenience, or then infilling a pond full of life, to make a cul-de-sac for yet another subdivision…… for the ample profit of the money spinners.
If you want to help the environment, immerse yourself in the nature you are a part. Instead of driving by and looking at the hiking trail across the Muskoka hinterland, park the car and go for a walk. Please. See nature up close and personal, and I guarantee you’ll be damn mad about the bullying that’s been going on around here…..and then possibly you won’t mind lending a hand to an old friend.
Give a thought about how many creatures will be affected by those landmovers. I can tell you with grave honesty, I could not survive in this locale if this bog was destroyed. So like the wee creatures of the bog habitat, I would have to find somewhere else to live. I would surely perish in heart at least, to find this wonderous, enchanted, life giving place compromised by the greed of social circumstance.
Excuse me now. It seems I have to go and discuss the inappropriate act of “refuse dumping” in the forest, perpetuated once again by a neighbor’s hired help,…. who insists on fouling the good graces of The Bog with materials he won’t pay to dispose of otherwise. Apparently it’s his democratic right, or so he thinks, to change natural history to suit his disposal needs.
And we wonder why we have an environmental crisis.

PLease check out my other blog at www.gravenhurstmuskoka.blogspot.com

Storied Muskoka –
Canada’s Haunted Lakeland

When I pass from this tired, frayed mortal coil, I too shall find Muskoka an accommodating domain for the still-unsettled spirit…..in this hauntingly craggy, gnarled, forested landscape that has for too long been taken for granted by her users and abusers.
I can’t take but one footfall from this homestead, here at Birch Hollow, than I feel the invigoration of unspecified old spirits and musty legend left to its own devices. Even when I sit in this creaking office chair, looking out over The Bog, I feel the presence of so much more than does the everyday traveler, who out of imposed necessity is too busy to stop and ponder the grand virtues of nature, and the subtle intrigue of the unexplained.
There are many good folks who reside down this lane, who have little use for “haunts” and the “marvels” of the hinterland. They have more important things to do in this frenetic world in which we live. There are aspects of this ballywick I feel are important and life-enhancing but a few of my contemporaries believe I am wasting my time selling virtues of enchantment and poetry; fantasy and the good graces of both legend and lore. The woodland I see now has a depth beyond what the naturalists identifies. The snaking creek through the hollow means more to me as analogy than the science of watershed alone. I suppose I am forever locked into the confusing hiatus between the natural and the supernatural. Yet I am contented to experience the joys of reality and then expectation while walking down these misty, well-worn pathways down into the hollow.
When the wind gusts bang at the light fixtures on the verandah, it’s as if the spirits are attempting to awaken the dead to their own new reality. Right this moment the gale force wind of an early spring storm whines through the cracks in this humble abode, and it’s as if there’s a cauldron of boiling souls somewhere beyond.
There are those who prefer to acknowledge weather as weather, wind as wind, and sunrise and sunset as a matter of sheer routine. There is no reason to question the quirks and peculiarities of a given day, other than possibly to offer some complaint about the inconvenience of having to go out in the rain or snow, or the blast of spring wind that puts sand into eyes, and hair into disarray.
I am rather passionate about these blustery circumstances, as I can always find something to write about when the sky is black, or the lightning flashes ignite so much brighter than white. I might sit here for an hour in a gentle submission, listening to birds chirp from the lilac boughs. In the event a fringe of dark, ominous looking cloud was to appear suddenly over the horizon pines, my typewriter would be employed in a rapid transmission from mind to key to paper. It is so wonderfully provocative when the wind howls and this house creaks in the thrusts of a storm’s initial bluster. Just as the wind etches down upon this vulnerable landscape presently, as we reside precariously on the brink of yet another spring storm. It is oh so much more interesting when nature decides it’s time to shatter mortal complacency. While the calm of early morning inspires the poet to write sentimentally about new beginnings and the rejuvenation of life, a mid afternoon storm cascades a wild fury of emotion and contempt, and it’s difficult to keep the fingers in tempo with the peaks and valleys of a powerful gale force.
I can sit here in the company of modern conveniences, a hot cup of tea and fresh biscuit, in warmth and comfortable sanctuary, yet feel as if, with this display of violent weather outside, I am alone in some remote wilderness cabin with a modest fire in the hearth, and most basic, humble shelter. I can feel the reaper’s long nails scraping at the window pane to harvest yet another wayfarer at the end of an adventure. I feel the icy grasp of death on my shoulder and shudder at the possibility this fire will extinguish, this hot tea run cold, this storied cabin left to erode into the landscape from which it was raised. There are many faces pressed against the glass, of travelers once, who may have lodged here for a time, partaking of nourishment to continue their passage to a homestead allotment further down the road.
Muskoka has been a tantalizing, alluring mistress for all these years. She has inspired me onward to discover the road less traveled, and left me questioning pertinent legend and lore at lakeside, when a spring sunset ignites the water into a great ball of liquid fire. I watch phantom canoes drift slowly across the lake, and have heard the whistle of a long lost steamship, and then saw the vapor off a lakeside bog float across the waterscape like two dancers in a tango. Nothing is quite as it seems. There is an intermingling of fact and fiction, legend and lore, ghosts and wee beasties that travel in the twilight of summer nights, up and down the rock faces of frozen-in-time ogres, and assorted other malevolent entities who curl up in the story-lines yet to be written.
There is a deep satisfaction in making a connection, with the qualities and quantities of unspecified manifestations; the ghost witnessed along the fern-laden garden path, or the fairy-kind found in dance ‘neath the midnight moon. It’s truly marvelous to find yourself in company with some goblin or other, at a time when a source of inspiration proves hollow and boring. How could any writer or artist-type, fail to be thoughtfully provoked, when provided exposure in some fashion, to the curious facets of what is often called the supernatural. I consider myself quite fortunate indeed to feel the hair on my neck standing in the chill of strange company, possibly encountered on a cemetery walk, or on a misted-over trail from one cottage structure to another.
I have no interest in protecting myself against all exposures to what a soothsayer might call “the paranormal.” I drink it all in as would any inspiration-starved creator, having this unnatural craving to compose until the final, ultimate collapse into exhaustion. It would be an unremarkable enterprise should these paranormal encounters suddenly cease. My goodness, what would I do? What would inspire me to sit for hours on end at this typewriter, if it wasn’t for a well placed, unanticipated haunting?
It’s apparent from what visitors to Birch Hollow tell me…. that we have quite enough ghosts already, to keep me company for many years to come. As an antique collector it is said that these wayward spirits may have arrived in our abode, quite unceremoniously attached to a work of art,….possibly an old pine cradle, a painting, book, or even a Victorian era teddy bear. My wife claims we have haunted dolls, and I have nary a reason to challenge her assumption.
Muskoka is most definitely a haunted, spiritual place, and there have been many testimonials from some of the country’s great poets and artists, agreeing there’s more here than just rocks, trees and water. There’s an ecstasy to experience. A spiritual freedom, a universality of potential beckoning free-thinkers to explore and create.
For those who wouldn’t recognize a spirit if they had one hop on their back for a wee joy-ride, sensing out the paranormal from the normal, the supernatural from the natural, is a matter of letting one’s imagination run unencumbered. It is necessary to allow your sensory perception to delve beyond the obvious. Pre-conceived notions block out a great deal of sensory perception. It’s a modern day condition consuming the child before its time. Possessing the good graces of a child’s imagination is the catalyst of unfettered adventure.
What do you feel sitting out along the Muskoka lakeshore in the darkness, and watching the magnificent fanning colors of the northern lights? Do you hear voices in the wind, when a spring gale washes down over the rock bluffs, and then through the pinery highlands? Do you feel that sense of awe when a storm-front rages down over the lakeland with a powerful fist, unclenching onto vulnerable lowlands, and then culling old leaning birches and evergreens as it rages through the woodlands.
Muskoka is a storied place, much like the historic valley of the Hudson River, made famous by American author Washington Irving. Muskoka has a collection of tales and legends to bestow the keen watcher….the curious traveler, the seeker of adventure, with the truths of good, faithful and historic hauntings.
If ye are the seekers of such adventure, you are welcome to join this mission of discovery…..and yes, I’ve known a few spirits in my time. If you don’t believe in ghosts and the paranormal, then consider these coming entries as wild speculation, ravings of a lunatic, and flights of unfathomable fancy. But if you dare to experience Muskoka’s spirited legacy, do read on…..more to come soon in this blog journal….the Nature of Muskoka.

Please visit my other blog at www.gravenhurstmuskoka.blogspot.com

My Occupancy of “Seven Person’s Cottage,” on Muskoka’s Lake Joseph

My first summer working as a reporter, for a publication then known as the Muskoka Lakes-Georgian Bay Beacon, in MacTier, gave me a rather unique opportunity afforded very few in our region.
I was asked to move closer to my work area, at least for the active summer month news season, and there wasn’t a great availability of affordable rentals especially close to the lake. Getting a small cottage was my choice, budgeting for a larger rent if it facilitated an on the job, half vacation feeling. I looked at a few places and frankly wasn’t impressed by either the asking prices or the rooms without a view at all. Finally one day I got word there was a rental for me, if I was interested, that would put me on the shore of Lake Joseph, in one of the most amazing cottages in the District; May to October, for a wee rental fee. As I would find out later we needed each other….it was an abode that simply had to be occupied, and well, after a recent break-up of a relationship, I confess to having been pretty lonely. For that brief period of time I was the occupying soul, and it made me feel welcome.
I caught a wink in the story teller’s eye as this story of nirvana, on the lake, continued to spin. I agreed to meet with the owner later that day, and to inspect this so called fairy-tale estate on the lake. Well, it was an experience like no other. I would become the first reporter-historian to occupy what was known affectionately as “Seven Persons Cottage.” When the host family brought me down the path from their house to the cottage, I was half expecting to find a castle-like structure, with a spire poking from the wreath of evergreens along the shore. They described it perfectly and I imagined it as precisely as my cogs and wheels of imagination could concoct, from the information provided. The only detail I had missed in the story, that was particularly relevant, was the scale of the castle to a full grown man.
When I got my first look at Seven Person’s Cottage I was aghast. Here was this architecturally interesting little building, perfect in every detail, but somewhat smaller than I had been led to believe. Actually it was tiny. Dwarf-like. A place best suited for gnomes and their kind. While I’m not a giant, I couldn’t imagine my robust frame getting through that doorway, let alone moving around inside. If I rented this place it would undoubtedly be a chapter right out of Gulliver’s Travels; and that I should certainly expect a visit from the Liliputins. If memory serves correct about Gulliver’s captors, and it doesn’t always live up to my expectation after all these wearying miles.
While I don’t believe I ever got the precise scale of the cottage, to what the full size home would have been on a normal, run of the mill lot, everything about the place was proportional, from the small doorway to the fireplace, the living room with bow window, to the dining room with pull-out table. The furniture wasn’t tiny but none of the pieces looked out of place in the small digs. While I didn’t have to duck except when coming through the front door of the cottage, it took awhile to figure out how to relate to everything being so much smaller than, well, I was used to as accommodation. The owner had a copy of the well known book that purportedly documented the lives of Gnomes, sitting atop the built-in desk just inside the door. The wooden mantle above the fireplace was carved with gargoyles supposedly to protect the place from wise guys like me.
After sitting in the living room for awhile on normal but minimalist chairs, I realized that this place was a blessing to my creative enterprise. I could watch out over the lake and a flat area of grassed embankment, where my neighbors at the adjacent cottage played croquet. That cottage was built by the gentleman who actually thought-up and scaled down the “Seven Person’s” abode. I got to meet him later in the summer season and that was a treat. He also collected old wooden pipes, his living room at the cottage jammed with these keepsakes. Some with carved faces, others made out of the world’s most precious woods.
My first night at Seven Persons Cottage was like living within the fiction of stories like Alice in Wonderland; a tad like Pooh Cottage, a slight sensation of residing at Toad Hall, in region of Wind in the Willows. I was in Peter Pan’s Neverland with Tinkerbell. When I ignited an old oil lamp in the front window, and threw a few bits of wood in the fireplace, the orange glow on old wood, made the place seem everso enchanted; antiquated beyond its years. The flickering flames of lamp and hearth gave the shadows a more sinister appearance than the place warranted, because of all things small, it had a large, warm soul if any residence can bestow such a feeling of welcome. I sat by the window for most of that first night, looking out at the lake bathed in moonglow, and watching the gargoyles on the mantle to see, if by chance, they might animate in the midnight revel known of the fairy kind.
In the morning, the light coming through that large front window made the rich wood interior appear as if it was the rear cabin of an old schooner, and the view behind might have been of the open sea. I sat there having a coffee and feeling as if I had known this place my whole life. What I would find out in the fall of the year, is that it would be the hardest place to leave as well.
As I recall, it had three bedrooms and a loft, and during that summer I had, at times, four people housed overnight, and more for get-togethers during the day. Everyone who visited got to share this prevailing, soothing well being, despite the evil eye of watchful gargoyles. The kitchen was tiny and the fenced-in backyard included an outhouse, the only real inconvenience of the place, other than the necessity to re-kindle a fire in the hearth to keep from freezing.
I wrote poetry throughout that spring-to-fall residency as this was a poetic place. I sat at the pull-out desk in the front room, and wrote by the light of the oil lamp, and listened to the boat engines chugging by day and night. How peaceful it was to sit by the crackling cedar fire in the cabin’s hearth. I would climb onto the window seat and drink wine until midnight, and then sleep in comfort until the invigoration of morning light poured through the window. In the daytime when I wasn’t chasing fire trucks or ambulance crews to accident scenes, or covering local municipal council events, I could sit down by the miniature harbor with proportionally constructed dock, and feel truly in another world….one so much smaller and more interesting than the one I knew during work hours. I half expected “Hammy the Hamster, and Roddy the Rodent,” to pull their little runabout up to the dock, and scurry along the embankment for a friendly game of croquet, with the other miniature characters I was sure dwelled here, kindly amongst the other curious non-realities concocted by over imagination..
I never felt alone at Seven Person’s Cottage. I never once felt bored or uninspired, and it was one of the most prolific writing jags of my life. I could hardly wait to get home and saddle up to that desk to pull another all nighter of composition. More than a few times something or other woke me up, with my head down on the desk top, a half glass of wine teetering on the edge of an old book. Maybe it was a mindful gnome begging my full retreat to bedlam. I smelled of woodsmoke and wine most of that summer season, or so I’m told. If ever there was a perfect spot to commence a writing career, one that for me began seriously that year of 1979-80 in the Muskoka heartland, it was at hearthside in that little cottage named “Seven Person’s.”
If you wonder about where my zigs and zags of authordom were first seeded, it would be correct to say, I had a fantastic beginning…… and in the tradition of the way it began, at Seven Persons, it has been an enchanting adventure ever-since. I think about that cottage frequently, and wish one day to return.



PLEASE VISIT MY OTHER BLOG AT GRAVENHURSTONTARIO.BLOGSPOT.COM

The ghosts and wee beasties of a magic Muskoka –
A glimpse beyond and below the reality we choose to accept

There are some folks here in the hinterland of Ontario, who look up at brand new balconied condominiums and utter words like, “isn’t this beautiful,” and “they’re just so enchanting.” Others look at another new urban subdivision, sprawling out toward the formerly treed horizon here in Muskoka, and suggest, “I would give anything to live here.” Well that’s true. What was given up happened to be the life-saving forest we apparently didn’t require as much as speculation housing and capitalist fortitude.
I grew up in a small town urban neighborhood called Hunt’s Hill (situated in north-east Bracebridge) that had only several postage-stamp size green-belts for us kids to hide-away. Two out of three were privately owned but no one ever ordered us off. Across from our apartment on Alice Street, was a small wooded lot abutting a mom and pop cottage rental business and corner store, owned by Fred Bamford, bless his kindly soul. The thick and thriving woodlot at the back of his property was a great source of inspiration to me over the four seasons, as a fledgling writer, taking an early stab at short story authordom, and then later a modest foray into poetry.
I couldn’t wait in the morning to climb out of bed and see what was happening in Bamford’s Woods. In the winter, after a snowstorm, it was a magnificent vista. In the spring, when the hardwoods were getting back their canopy, every day residing beside that woodland was remarkably different than the day before, and the first wildflowers of late spring, the lilacs in small clusters, inspired me to acquire oil paints and canvas in an attempt to tap my artistic skill. It was good I didn’t place all the eggs in that particular basket, as I turned out to be a rather poor painter. In the autumn, it was inspiring and yet sad to watch the canopy change so brilliantly in hue, then cascade to the ground in the first windstorm of October. No matter how it appeared back then, it was my restorative woodland, and it might as well have been ten thousand acres because that’s the way I measured its impact on my creative enterprise. The fact it wasn’t much more than an acre on one urban block never seemed to matter. What did matter was when they decided to mow down the trees to make way for an apartment complex. It marked the beginning of a change in my hometown’s way of doing things, in the name of progress, I have never come to grips with since.
My relationship with nature, and woodland places, began early in life. My sources of inspiration were many, and I studied my environs constantly seeking out the enchantments the writers of fables and tall tales had told me about, in the print of their neatly bound tomes stacked at my bedside. I was born curious and have never believed anything is exactly as it seems, and that it is our mission in life to seek answers and quest constantly, and judge accordingly the mysteries and realities of mother earth.
I have never awoken one morning in my life that I haven’t been prepared to greet either heaven or something parallel, or other. When I awake to look out at a Muskoka woodland, I know it’s the privilege of having a little heaven on earth.
I surely could one day re-awaken to a scene in the afterlife, whatever that might manifest in an immortal sense. I suppose, because of this joyful waking, either dead or alive, I’ve had that heavenly expectation push past the edges of my specific reality. I see and feel aspects of fantasy and assorted other enchantments, even sitting by the window at first light, looking down on what appears to be the tangible, physical, dimensional world as we know it by immersion. I do however, look upon this scene unfolding each morning, with unspecified but ample expectation for some heavenly, supernatural intervention. I’m seldom disappointed.
When my mother Merle used to call me “wide-eyed” and “overly imaginative,” she appreciated that “reality” for me, was always hedged by something else; some extra-sensory capability of placing actuality in the context of Alice in Wonderland, or the Wizard of Oz. I see possibilities that my contemporaries then and now could not. If I was to explain to any one of my friends that I had witnessed a wayward spirit while on a walk through the woods, a ghost in a garden, a wee fairy on a mushroom or a goblin stealing an apple off a picnic blanket, I would be considered delusional and signed up for rigorous therapy. The one true gift I possess in this mortal coil, is the ability to see and appreciate what you can only call the “fantastic.”
I have witnessed and documented more than a dozen ghostly encounters here in Muskoka, and there are another twelve or so I’ve been keeping in the wings, just in case I decide to put a book together of Muskoka’s weird and unexplained mysteries. The problem for me is that I’ve never been frightened by a single so-called paranormal experience, such that it would be pure fiction to apply any tingling, alluring, or unsettling quality to the stories. I’ve had good and positive experiences with all of my so-called spiritual experiences and strange encounters, and I couldn’t imagine doctoring one to frighten any one. I surely feel like telling folks about my own paranormal adventures but just not in a way that will bestow fear and trembling in the hearts of those I tell.
My wife Suzanne said one day that I must be like the kid in the movie who said, “I see dead people.” Problem for me is that I don’t necessarily know they’re amongst the deceased when I meet them on my travels. I have met people on country roads, in cemeteries, in building hallways, on a forest trail, and even at my door here at Birch Hollow that may have been more vapor than substance. I’ve turned around quickly to double-check on my mates when we part, to find nothing more than open space. Only moments after talking to a visitor at a cemetery, I take a glance back and find gravestones and flowers but no other traveler. I’ve met people walking on the shoulder of the road who vanished once we passed one another. I’ve spoken to folks who have just looked at me with nary a nod, and then disappeared into thin air. The fantastic side of this, is that I’ve, at the very least, been privileged to have experienced some of what is referred to as “the paranormal,” without getting beaten, eaten or pulled into the after-life by one of these strange spirited pedestrians.
As a writer my relationship with the curiosities of life and after-life have suited my interests in actuality; I write about a storm crossing a lakeland by being immersed in that scene, not interpreting someone else’s photograph or depending on some other voyeur’s description. I have never once walked through a forest, or down a cobbled lane, that I put expectation or anticipation ahead of welcome reception. I don’t anticipate what I will discover on a lakeshore trail, winding down through an autumn landscape but when it arrives with a spark of enticement, it is the true measure of fulfillment, being entitled to see the dimensions of existence in this world and beyond.
Since childhood I have kept company with the spirit-kind. When I was about five or six years of age, I remember so vividly have a dreadful infection of the lungs that kept me coughing for more than three weeks straight. I would cough so hard and long that it would make me vomit. After a particularly difficult night, only settling long enough to sleep an hour or two, I can remember waking soaking wet with a substantial fever. I was in an out of slumber as the fever raged and then crested into a slow release by early morning. During one of the longer periods unconscious, possibly as the fever broke, I had an angelic vision. I dreamt that I was in the basement of our apartment building in Burlington, Ontario, where there were washing machines and driers for tenants. I remember standing at the bottom of the stairs, on the cold grey concrete floor, looking up at the door. It was then that a brilliant white form took shape, from the door toward the top of what I assume was a table, or washing machine top. The shape hovered there for several dream seconds and when it finally settled, the image of an angel manifested with an amazing plumage of wing feathers and a misty aura making it a soft, cool image versus having any sharply defined lines or features. I knew I was in the company of a messenger not just an apparition for apparition’s sake. This was the real article as far as this five year old kid was concerned.
There was no word spoken, her to me, me to her. I just stared up in absolute awe at what was hovering in front and above the mortal witness. Her soft, kind eyes and hand beckoning mine, inspired a feeling of confidence and security I can not describe with the accuracy and emphasis that it deserves. To this moment I can re-create that state of nirvana and contentment as if she was with me now, drawing me away from the tasks and preponderances of daily existence. It was not a mortal feeling I have experienced again.It was a deep and profound sense of peace and well-being that easily trumps every other emotion….every other sensation.
Most people I relate this story to remark that I must have been on the brink of death, and that the angel was sent to harvest the soon to be released soul. I have no reason to doubt that this was the case, as I battled this respiratory distress. The visitation occurred at the peak of fever, or at least that’s what my mother tells me when I relate the “angel in the laundry-room story.” The fever dropped and it left me exhausted but obviously alive. Possibly the angel had been dispatched to let me know it wasn’t my time, and that I should fight a little harder to hang onto mortal existence. I never felt the angel was there to reap me for the rewards of heaven but rather to ease my suffering, and let me know there was a lot left to experience of worldliness.
From this spiritual encounter onward, I have never resisted or deferred supernatural experiences because frankly I believe, having been in the company of an angel afterall, there are important messages attached to each event and involvement that must be appreciated and understood. That is of course, if you really wonder about the meaning of life in the first place. Most people I know would have pinched holes into their skin trying to awaken themselves, in a similar circumstance to mine, having the uncomfortable companionship of a fully winged angel. What for me was a life enhancing, vision-expanding relationship for those few dreamy moments in childhood, led to a life of appreciation for all those aspects that defy precise definition and explanation.
My favorite author Washington Irving, wrote in the early 1800’s, about the intrusive knife blade of science, dissecting nature to its finest, smallest molecule, to reveal the source of its life and growth. While he was an information seeker, and cherished honest appraisal of life and times, he felt that the botanist was rebuking the mysteries of existence, such that no one should ever believe in the non-science of fairies and their kind, or hold stock in any tale of enchantment and mystery. He rightfully worried that expectation and fantasy had their place in the life and imagination of the modern man, and that the world would indeed be a very dull place if all the traditions and tall tales were exposed as unfounded and fraudulent.
There is no way, no science, no technology great enough to dissuade me from believing I was in the presence of an angel. How could I fear death having witnessed the preamble to heaven-sent charity. I trust that when I inhale the final breath of life, my angel shall return with outstretched hand, to lead me home in peace and all heavenly tranquility.
There’s a magic that exists in everyday life for those who seek it out. Of this potential to explore the fantastic, I will always be an adventurer.

Please check out my other blog at gravenhurstmuskoka.blogspot.com

In the Midst of a Canadian Landscape –

There is still the half round ice-trail weaving between the brown soggy clumps of wetland grasses, and the black zig-zag of run-off water gurgling and frothing in a tiny cataract to my left. I walked on the path just the other day but the warm afternoon sun has presently eroded the snow canopy down to only a trace left in the shadows of leaning old birches, the ones poet Robert Frost liked to write about…..although I confess to being somewhat bewildered what the analogy meant to real life.
I came to this hollow of the Bog a thousand times over the winter, with trusted canine companion Bosko, and watched winter sculpt down sharply upon this frozen, lonely landscape. I’ve stood here and watched the four resident deer bound over the snow drifts where today there is the busy trundling of squirrels and a couple of crows picking at something in the matted grasses. I stood here listening to the wind howling on a sub-zero, moonlit night, and watched many mornings as the sun painted this hollow from ridge to treeline, a brilliant, sparkling gold. What an amazing contrast today, when the voyeur might even bask a little, leaning back against the tall pine that catches a goodly amount of sun on days like this one, as early spring makes its stroke upon this incredible scene of life’s re-awakening..
It has been a busy winter season in the capitalist sense. We’ve all worked hard to make those necessary financial gains that allow a few moments of escape from the regimen of modern life and times. I remember one evening a few years ago now, driving to a meeting I didn’t wish to attend, and stopping on the Muskoka Beach Road in area of the Stephens Bay. I looked down at the farmhouse cradled in the January snowfield and illuminated so brilliantly in early evening moonglow. I thought about all this hustle and mean bustle to achieve one thing after another, and how great it would be to just decline going to a meeting, to sit here instead and watch the moon continue to rise, and celebrate a truly enchanting evening in the heart of Muskoka. I have always hated going to meetings and anyone who has participated in one, seated next to me, has probably been highly irritated by my unsettled, squirming, anticipatory vigor and general impatience with the clock and speaker. And I decided on that particular evening to stop going to meetings. Seriously. I’d had enough of meeting-happy citizens sucking the independence out of my life. Since then, I have only attended several and then it was only because it was in defense of a threatened public park by greedy development interests and poor political leadership. On those occasions I was too mad to think about everything else I was missing, tied to the auditorium chair.
I have a fear of being fettered by anyone, anything or any event, and I’m always cutting away commitments someone else makes for me. Don’t you hate that? Finding out you’ve been recruited by some group or an organizing committee about to change the world in their image.
My wife Suzanne used to agree to our attendance at after work functions or what I used to call the grim and grimace affairs, where small talk was coated with niceties and so were the meatballs. When I was on the job myself as a day to day editor for the local press, and party time would roll around, the only reason I could muster the stamina to go was if it was a way to scoop up a story tip, get a date, or gather up enough food and beverage to bring myself (in my appraisal of the shortfall) up to an acceptable wage. Of course the only way that was truly possible, is if I’d carried out a couple of antiques, a sofa and sideboard because I was paid horribly as a writer. Nothing new there! So standing around exchanging pleasantries wasn’t an option. I eyed the food and booze and my wife would get embarrassed by mid-evening and possibly leave me dripping of sweet and sour sauce, or heading for the open bar again and again..
I guess my actions were so loathsome that she gave up on sharing her invitations with me evermore. Suzanne attends these functions with colleagues alone and I tend to the four pets and two sons still residing here at Birch Hollow. All seems to be working in this particular case of social dysfunction. When she asked me the other day, why I don’t like going to parties or after-work socials, and whether it linked back to some terrible misadventure in youth, I did have somewhat of a breakthrough in conscience.
As a reporter for the local press, part of our job assignment was to cover every grip and grin in central and south Muskoka. The “grip and grin,” is the photo-op, when one hand of friendship (supposedly) meets another. It’s a nice image for the social pages but my publisher liked these staged shots for the front page. Every press day it was the same argument….accident or crime scene versus anniversary grip and grin. Gads, how inappropriate. I went to anniversaries, birthdays, family reunions, weddings, ribbon cuttings, service club shindigs and covered oh so many political visitations to one and all in this ballywick,… Muskoka. I would get to an anniversary at a community hall or family residence, and be cordially received then forgotten about usually until hour two, the time my feet would start to take root. Most often I’d have to watch everyone else eat and eat and eat, and when they weren’t eating they were sucking back the booze. Maybe only once in about a decade of this community minded stuff was I ever offered a piece of cake, a pop or a chair. And I’ll tell you what….that if I had so much as thought about being intrusive and asking to set up a photograph ahead of their schedule, a call would have been made to my boss demanding that I got lashes for insolence.
And truth is, many times I was hungry because there was no food in my house, as the pay didn’t afford many frills beyond covering rent and a few bottles of beer a week. Yes, the writer-kind would rather give up food than booze. So as these folks are passing around platters of turkey and roast beef, Yorkshire Puddings and great bowls of steaming spuds, beans, carrots and then there was the desert, by golly, it was the kind of emotional abuse that etches onto the soul. I was hungry. How grand and generous it would have been to offer me a plate and a place in line for the buffet. But no, I was just the photographer, the reporter who would put this event into the paper for posterity. Here’s some posterity for you…..it made me very angry over a painful decade, and yes when my wife queries why I don’t like attending functions, I could unwind a thousand tales similar, where niceties just don’t make up for years of being forced to attend fetes for the ignorant, grand balls for the arses of the social grandiose.
Toward the end of my reporting years, when I actually begged to get fired, I may have grabbed off one or more of those luscious meatballs that passed beneath my nose, and scooped up a few butter tarts when no one was looking, and although I don’t remember exactly, I may have got caught with a slab of beef in my pocket for a sandwich later on. It’s most likely these hosts “with the most” did contact my publisher and demanded satisfaction,…. which in their minds probably meant firing me and giving their anniversary coverage front page instead of being tucked into the classifieds beside “In Memoriums.” I really didn’t care if they fired me or not because I’d become a rogue-employee by those final years, and damn if I was going to attend ribbon cuttings and anniversaries without fringe benefits. If I wasn’t offered them, well, I took what food was required to get the energy to snap the photograph. I’m sure I was a spectacle. A poster boy for Reporter’s Monthly, chasing down that hot wing with a snatched glass of ale.
Suzanne doesn’t ask me to accompany her to social events in part because she fears I will resort to some insane justification ritual, to balance what I have to put up with in inane conversation, with a mitt full of shrimp and cheese for pain and suffering. I’m not quite so boorish at home but invite me into your home, and expect something edible to go missing. Heck I took a bite out of an ornamental candle once when I got bored, and at a wedding my girlfriend said I ate the bride’s bouquet. That was good news considering that later I was sick to my stomach, and got the shock of my life when I yacked up a fern and flower petals. Thought it was the autumn sunset of my life!
I sure like the freedom afforded Bosko and I here in the midst of this Canadian landscape, listening to the spring melt wash through this lowland, and the honking geese flying out over Lake Muskoka. The sky’s the limit today. No fetters for as far as the eye can see. No one planning that I should attend anything more than the dinner table and lounge chair to watch Coronation Street. Seeing as I never miss an episode of dinner or Coronation Street, Suzanne informed me that I am most definitely fettered by habit. I guess she’s right. At least they’re my bonified habits, not the habits of others I’m forced to endure.
If any one thing parallels my years as a writer, it is this feeling of shackles past, when to make a buck I had to prostitute myself as a decent reporter, going to events that were nothing more than grandstanding photo ops…..and it made me angry. I just never realized how angry until that night, staring out over this amazing Muskoka farmstead, bathed in the satin light of a winter moon, thinking about the hours yet to spend in the company of committee members and point making. I turned around after a lengthy and thoughtful vigil, and refused to spend the rest of my life restrained. As a writer of blogs, I’ve never been so liberated, and so resolved to remain this way.
Get out and celebrate the Canadian landscape this spring. That’s what Bosko and I will be doing in between these sessions where she sleeps beside and I tap musically at the keyboard in that personal harmony lost then found.

Please visit my other blog at gravenhurstmuskoka.blogspot.com

Home as Castle – My Bastion Here in the Hinterland

As a hard-living, hard drinking, sort of go-getter when I felt like it, with a constant hangover, my bachelor pad in Bracebridge played host residence to a hundred or more humdinger after-hours’ events. The get-togethers were always after something or other. A game of hockey. A council meeting that had bored us to tears. A day of work, a week of work, the celebration of a lunar eclipse. We always found a way of celebrating life and its foibles. By definition, we were kind of “real life foibles,” ourselves. But we tried not to be intrusive with our emotional releases. Some neighbors would argue to the contrary that we didn’t try hard enough, and they had no choice but to share our celebrations.
While I have always written about my assorted wee residences over the decades, there has always been humor and anecdote attached…..they were by definition “abodes” but the craziness that was harbored within made them only half-residential, the other half seemingly fictional. I have never, for instance, been all that proud, even in retrospect, to have been the near legendary host of a half dozen spaghetti barbecues in the early 1980’s. I awoke at dawn on those mornings to gather up the empties that were strewn down the street by my badly behaved apartment guests. If you’ve ever heard about the lifestyle adopted by wild-side writer-reporter-kind, then you can appreciate that having a room full can be an administrative nightmare. While I have always been a “nester,” loving the respective digs in which I dwell, my Bracebridge apartment was very much a halfway house…..we were halfway to becoming alcoholics or really good writers in-waiting; dealing with their ongoing social contraventions. I awoke one morning to find that one of my guests had broken an expensive, custom made canoe paddle, and shoved the two pieces just above the nativity scene. It was some type of social commentary I’m sure, or a particularly negative review of my party hosting capability.
After marriage, and a few hangover get-togethers with that old gang of mine, my wife suggested it was time that I grew up, and distanced from the ringleaders able to get me to drink more than my budget of booze. I was more offended by the fact she didn’t believe me to be ringleader material, than the reality she was asking me to get rid of the crumb bums of spaghetti barbecue days. After a period of feeling at loose ends, without a half dozen spent reporters on my sofa set, I had a chance to appreciate more fully this “home” thing I had desired all these years since my own childhood.
Here it is the spring of 2007 and my homestead feelings, this writer in residence nestled amidst more books than the public library, has again been intruded upon,….. violated; its security breached by a good intentioned but typically wayward neighbor who adores getting into my backyard. Now while this may seem pretty darn trivial in the grand scheme of intrusions, especially with my own history of housing half the town at my shindigs, I’ve really taken to heart this privacy thing after a weighty stint in the public domain.
Since I began writing and getting published regularly in the local press, which began in earnest back in the late 1970’s, and getting involved in public initiatives such as launching groups like the Historical Society and a community museum in Bracebridge, along with my many other public commitments, I confess to sinking into homelife gently and calmly. When I had more than a few readers angered at the editorial opinion of the newspaper, or perturbed at the bias of a particular column, I could always count on this oasis to keep me out of the public eye at least temporarily. I even developed a rather curious angst about phone calls. I would answer them religiously during the day but I have long made it clear that I won’t be available after hours. I didn’t have this privilege when I was a reporter because fires, accidents and news events don’t stick to business hours.
After quite a number of years out of the day-to-day reporting, editorial grind, I still get calls from news sources expecting I will hop on over to their place for a really big scoop. While I am published more widely and successfully today than I ever was working for the community press alone, I still get a fair number of phone calls and personal appearances from folks looking to give me future story ideas. Most are rather self serving projects, like the guy who asked me to write his biography and carry the expense to self publish. I thanked him for his input and suggested it would be an idea for the future…..”someone else’s future,” I mumbled going out the drive. In the reporting business here, I was exposed to a fair number of people who needed my help. While I was a pretty fair listener some of the story ideas cracked me up. I didn’t want to be rude but by golly, the nutters had my life planned to the final exclamation. I didn’t have any choice but to distance myself, in new writing ventures, from that old gang of mine….old reporters who don’t know when to go home, and inquisitive others who never seemed to be dislodged by my evasive actions, short of hanging up mid-conversation. I’ve only ever done that to telemarketers.
Mixed into this I had a couple of blokes who wanted to re-arrange my physical attributes after I defied their warnings about publishing stories that included their names and extent of incident participation. Impaired drivers get real testy when they read about their exploits on the front page. I’ve had death threats to boot but then it’s pretty uncommon to find a reporter who hasn’t been threatened over one incident or paragraph in their editorial past. With a young family and many other business interests, including my antique enterprise, which put us in the public domain regularly, home did become both safe haven and bastion. After a grueling week of dealing with all sorts of public interaction, and story ideas coming out the whazoo, I’d get one step up this drive here at Birch Hollow, and feel the weight of the world lifted. It wasn’t so much that it was a place to hide-out from my fetters, because they knew how to get here but it was a philosophical, poetic divide from the onslaught of good fun that I had once openly encouraged.
I felt that my passion for solace and escape created a sort of invisible shield around the maples and evergreens, the lilacs in the front yard flanking our beautiful imported raspberry canes. We had plucked them from a raspberry garden at the family cottage on Lake Rosseau, in the Village of Windermere. Although our property is typically urban and unremarkable except for the clutter, it has all the attributes of a castle we can afford. I don’t have a moat or a rock wall, with a spiked iron gate, to exclude guests and assorted other folks who wander up my lane. I don’t even have a sign begging people to leave this scribe alone. And we routinely answer the door to an amazing collection of peddlers and the like, wishing to massage our financial resources for yet another worthy cause. In fact, I can’t imagine getting more people to our front and back door, unless I went to the extent of signing that we were offering free beer for one and all.
My wife reminds me that I began all this intrusive goodwill, except for the hawkers and peddlers, by doing a myriad of favors for all who apparently desired my services. It is true I was conned into writing thousands of promo pieces, business stories, human interest pieces, memorials, obituaries for friends who begged consideration. What hurt most of all, was that there were few, if any of these folks, who would have given me the time of day if I’d had a request of them. In fact, as soon as I left the regular reporting beat, most of these glad-handers wouldn’t even acknowledge me on the street, if there was only two of us on the whole block.
My boys believe I’ve become somewhat reclusive in my mid-life crazy years, and I would be hard pressed to deny that I do rather enjoy slinking away from the rat race that thrives in perpetuity a few steps beyond this relative safe haven. I have filled this home with stuff that pleases me. Antiques and paintings, sculptures and books, books, and more books. I couldn’t be bored or dissatisfied for long in this place of intrigue, because there’s always a nook or cranny to explore, full of time’s curiosities. As far as writing goes, I’m inspired just waking up and looking around. At the rate I buy and sell this stuff, the mood changes here on a daily basis. It’s the stuff creative writers adore. Odd shapes, strange titles, mysterious portals, thought-provoking images. It’s like a poet-artist exploded here, and left their inspirations everywhere.
I will often immerse myself in some writing jag and spend three hours or more huddled over the keyboard without realizing I’m oh so much older than when I began. Geez I’ve missed some appointment(s), maybe a scheduled pick-up of a now stranded loved one. While I adore company, I can no longer write in the midst of turmoil as I once did in a crowded, sandwich pitching, coffee swilling newsroom. Just now there was another knocking at the door that sent the hound, Bosko, on a wild howl downstairs to unceremoniously greet yet another salesperson. I frequently demand that Bosko, for his treats, exercise security around here, and at times she’s been known to keep my wife outside a few moments longer, in order that I can finish a thought without her friendly editorial inquisition. I recognize this will seem offensive to some, admitting that I keep my wife out of the editorial loop. The reality is we’ve had a longstanding agreement that she won’t read my stuff unless it relates to her directly. It’s an agreement that has held from the mid 1980’s to the present. Artistic license allows me to get away with a lot of stuff. I’ve mentioned her in this column but I’m not going to tell her. Unless you tell her, I’ll go unpunished.
For all these years spent holed-up at Birch Hollow, this is the year I have to get forceful about unplanned, unwelcome visitations. I have way too many people banging the varnish off my doors these days, selling everything from fresh fish to aluminum siding, fundraising chocolate bars to lawn maintenance and everything imaginable in between. A while ago I came back to the house to pick something up that I had forgotten, and heard several people talking in my back yard. They had the nerve of criticizing the “guy that owns, and doesn’t maintain this place,” and then trying to shake my hand as they found me coming round the corner. I asked them to leave three times before it finally sank in that their version of the Bible and mine, were simply not going to mesh that morning.
This past summer we had the most beautiful and draping fern canopy, abutting our lawn, we had ever seen since constructing our front gardens. One afternoon my son came to tell me that a neighbor was cutting our lawn. I was in the middle of a feature column for an antique publication, only a few moments from deadline, and I abruptly suggested that he must be mistaken as it was “impossible,” and “they know damn well where the property line is.” He came back a few moments later and said, “Dad, you know those ferns?” “Why yes, son,” I replied while trying to maintain the structure of a sentence on the computer. “Well, they’re gone.” And they were. It seems a lodger at my neighbor’s homestead had decided to do a good turn and mow the lawn, and amidst all the enthusiasm and kindness being bestowed had clearly ignored things like property rights and fern bylaws….which in my books noted quite clearly….”don’t you even think about touching them!” When I arrived out front and saw that about twenty feet of our lawn and lovely ferns had been mowed to the level of a putting green, I nearly imploded. I did however, have the good sense to return indoors before screaming, and after a short while of interior ranting, I emerged with a new plan to save the last remaining ferns. You know what they say about best laid plans.
The same chap cut our lawn three more times before we erected a new garden with sturdy iron post right in the middle of his path of choice. I watched the day he approached the bar, tipped his hat, scratched his head, looked at the property marker, and finally got the message he’d been cutting the wrong lawn. We all agreed that if he had violated our property with the strategically placed garden in place, we would then have had to erect a honking big sign to “Mow Off!”
For a person who thought he’d be wandering aimlessly from gig to gig, digs to digs for the rest of my life, my nesting instinct has paid wonderful dividends at this grey, balding time of life. And while my partners in this ballywick now refer to me as the whack-a-mole neighbor, because I pop out when least expected, I like living at Birch Hollow despite the regular intrusions. A few moments ago a thoughtful neighbor was in my backyard attempting to deliver mail put in the wrong box. Bless her intrusive soul. But the backyard is where we hang the unmentionables, and geez, today it’s a full gallery out there. I’m thinking about a warning to interlopers about “alligator in backyard,” or “have you seen our missing cobra?”
It’s true as well, that I’d be in deep “do” if I was having a heart attack and my rescuer believed the sign….and said….”I’m scared of snakes, sorry Ted, I guess you’re going to die!”


Quirks of the Writer – Eccentricities of the Collector

A succession of girlfriends thought I was becoming a full blown nutter. My foray into writing labeled me as “artistic” and “ever-brooding,” as the wandering-aimlessly poet. Add to this my parallel interest in old stuff, as a fledgling collector, and it might explain why I chased a few of the ladies out the door with apparent madness all round. A few of these young ladies objected to the fact I was a reporter and measured up to all the lifestyle excesses expected of a newsie who liked the boozie. Got to admit I was a confluence of a lot of weird interests…..tolerable one at a time but a dangerous, conflicting undertow working the emotions of the same body.
It’s kind of funny now because I was always dead serious about my professions. At least then. Today I’m serious about very little except the outrageous taxation in this country and urban sprawl. As a writer I guess my brooding is still hale and hardy but I’ve got a much better sense of humor. As a collector, I’m over most of the excesses I think, unless of course I find a horse-drawn hearse or a coffin with a window I’ve always wanted to own. I’ve tried to buy both but fell short a couple of grand.
I think if any peculiarity these days, it’s my penchant for story grinding, which may explain why friends detour any which way out of my path, to avoid hour long sessions about my latest obsession. My wife has had to adjust to “new normal,” four or five times a year depending on my need for broader horizons. I’m on a freedom loving crusade now and want rid of my shackles…..these old books that clutter each room, and from a writer’s perspective, I want rid of all the old story-lines and historic fetters that have kept me coming back to the same old overdone explorations year after year.
I have always believed I would be a writer until death. I’ve already given my antique enterprise to son Robert in the event of my demise, and judging by the look of “oh by the Jesus,” he will insist I leave him a lot less rather than a lot more stuff to cope with. I will leave both boys my manuscripts, a few half written novels, a book of prose I’ve been working on for the past six months, and a brief biography of how I got sucked into the antique business way back when.
Out of about ten girlfriends before I got married to charming bride Suzanne, most of my female chums liked the passionate writer-side more than the weasel-kind scrounger I was becoming due to the collecting bug. They liked clinging onto my arm when we got to go to grand openings and extravagant dinners, at posh resorts, as a partner to a well known writer…. but distanced themselves when I started stroking the vintage furniture and collectables adorning the place. The collector side couldn’t have cared less about a relationship, other than with a coveted piece of this or that void of a pulse. The terrible twinning of collector and writer has never really worked all that well, in romantic pursuits, until I began penning columns for trade publications. I guess it in some way smacked of a scholarly, academic character buried somewhere beneath the ever-questing, holy grail sleuthing, writer-collector with the bumper sticker that read, “Back off- I stop at all yard sales. So should you!” I could be driving along talking to some wonderful lady about great literature one moment, and be haggling with some yard sale vendor for an old vase five minutes later. Not particularly romantic but it’s me!
At this mid-life crazy period I’m not really sure what the future holds. Suzanne will be retiring one of these days and we have follied with the idea of opening a small antique shop somewhere in the District of Muskoka. I hate the idea of being tied down to a any location except this abode at Birch Hollow, and frankly the writer’s urge demands that I live forever-more a wanderer’s existence. I love my home as I’ve written about frequently but I’ve always had this one huge common area between the life of the writer and the passion of the collector, and that is to hit the open road as frequently as possible. Seeing new sites, new vistas, horizons, sunrises and sunsets over different land and waterscapes appeals to the creative interests of the writer, the antique shop over the hillside and around the bend, encourages the flicker into a flame for the collector. Suzanne however, I believe, would like very much to find a small rural home to carry on a craft business, and I know it’s what would please her moreso than driving anywhere, anymore. You see, this is the poor, charitable woman who inherited the conflicted soul, that’s me, and has endured the lure of the open road over so many, many years. As a persuasive writer and a nagging, manipulative antique fanatic, she has always gone along with the plan I’ve presented for free weekends…… even though in her estimation, a stint at home would do wonders for the weary, half lost soul.
I expect the compromise must come from me this time in our lives. I am sure we will find a little homestead somewhere around here, that will suit her sewing, fabric enterprise, and hopefully offer me a few acres to explore and pen poetic, just as I’ve benefited from the setting here at Birch Hollow. Suzanne deserves this after a lengthy career as a teacher, and for once the collector-writer has found the sensitivity to land back as husband and soul mate, a situation long overdue.
In these mature years I propose to write when the urge strikes, and collect when opportunity prevails but alas in proportion to the time required to help Suzanne run her business. I’m such a liar.
Maybe it was on a full moon that I was bitten in slumber by a vampire with interest in literature and antiques. I’ll never know why or how but I’m not expecting these fangs to fall out any time soon.
Suzanne keeps reminding me that my mentor Dave Brown made a choice…..books or a wife, and his wife got the short straw.
On occasion I’ve given up on my pursuits, one at a time, and even both on occasion when I developed an enduring frustration the result of overlapping failures. I sort of expect my future compromise, for the good of the union, will be to collect fabric antiquities instead of books and write about vintage quilts and textiles instead of regional history and current events. Suzanne knows I can never fully retire from either but she’s learned a few tricks along the way, to bring the obsessed back to the hearth for re-kindling.
I’m rushing these last sentences to completion because the thrift shop uptown has just now opened. Oh gads, here I go again! The collector hurrying up the writer to get to the point.
The moral of the story is….you’re going to have a beggar of a time finding a partner as tolerant as mine!