more from the walk

Wellington is always game for the outdoors. This dog is my muse. He is so effortlessly beautiful. Such elegance and grace in all that he does. He's taken to running over and greeting my neighbour when she gets home from work everyday and the other night he just staid over there and had tea or whatever he does with her and I forgot about him and eventually went to bed. Then at 11pm I hear this barking and it's him huddled on the porch wanting in.

Juniper was awake for most of the 3 hour jaunt. She stays silent in the chariot unless I stop for too long. She looks sleepy because she decided to wake up every 1.5 hours for some miowks ALL NIGHT LONG.

Which is why I look so ghastly tired. Sometimes I think I see a glimmer of Grace Under Fire in my photos. Strange. 

I went barefoot on the way back. Just had the urge. I spent an entire week barefoot during frosh week in my fourth year at Trent. Helped kids move bar fridges into their dorms and brought them on tours of downtown Peterborough. What a fucking hippie I am sometimes. Anyway, the path from the cabin through the fields to the river is basically sand and it had warmed in the sun. Walking with such awareness of the texture and the temperature of the earth, how  utterly Buddhist of me. haha. I hope the farmer finds my prints and gets a thrill from the thought of Pocahontas meandering through his back forty. Are toe rings really relics of the 90s? I think maybe I've had that one on since then haha. 

Obligatory mountain shot.

(Shizzzzop talk: I figured out how to make my photos stretch to fit the page perfectly thanks to a blog called My Girl Thursday here! This is so exciting because I was never happy with how puny my photos looked and making them bigger just made them bleed into the sidebar. Yes, I am a techno weenie who doesn't know anything knows a bit about html.)

fog in the morning

These cravens were clattering around on top of the hangar this morning and the noise drew me outside and I immediately went back in to grab the camera. I tucked Juniper in the chariot with a few blankets and Wellington followed along as I took what I thought would be a few photos. A few hours later we had meandered our way through the fog and the fields of oats all the way to the Yukon River which is about 2kms from our cabin, snapping photos all the while.

 Such a crude, industrial looking building but so beautiful. 

Sasquanch would know. Raven or Crow. Either way they drew me out with all the cawcawcawing and flailing around on the tin roof. Of course I thought they were greeting me. That's what we humans do. We assume things about nature. Things that include us. What we forget is that nature has simpler intentions, more basic, yet infinitely more important than us. They were probably using sound to help them get around in the fog. (Or they were just whooping it up because the fog was so beautiful, tehe).

I found this child in the oats...

hail me a taxidermist

Our landlord is a taxidermist. (a really good one)

The other day we were in a bit of a hurry so Jon pulled the car around to the shop and had me jump out to pay rent. I was feeling off. Not personable at all. Feeling like the perfect mixture of both my agoraphobic grandmothers, aching knuckles and all. And sometimes when I am feeling this way I say things without thinking. 

I can't see through the shop door so I knock and open it slowly. A beautiful life size diorama of animal death welcomes me. A caribou, neck curved towards me, nostrils as if drinking me in; bear skin upon bear skin piled upon the pollished concrete floor; chocolate brown, tawny, snow-white furs hanging on hooks or draped over wooden crates; trophy busts with glorious racks; entire creatures frozen in this beautiful imagined moment. 

The taxidermist asks how are things and I say great.
I turn the question back on him.
"We're surviving," he says.
"Not these guys," I say.

woof meow poop

Why have I suddenly taken up blogging? Because a few days ago I realized the most coherent sentence to come out of my mouth all day was to my dog Wellington: "Dodo, you want a kookie?"


A few more tidbits from the transcripts of my daily life with a cat, a dog and a newborn baby:


Me: Bika Bika want a brushie? (to Milo the cat)


***
Me: Dodo, no runned away, dingdong dodo! Go fo a wok dodo?


Wellington: *wags tail* (this being the most coherent thing I hear all day)


Me: "Git the schquirrel dodo."


***
Juniper: Wah wah cooooo wahh Awhooohunn


Me:  Oh daas baybay, you sad? Dawahweeewahwoz.

As you can see the most I get in return is a muttacular wag of the tail, a reassuring feline narrowing of the eyes, or sphinct-orations from a newborn about the robo-calls scandal in the US of eh! aka Canada.

Humour me?

no running water

It didn't happen on purpose. We didn't seek out housing that lacked something so fundamental as running water because we were trying to save the world or the whales or the whatevers. This is just how things worked out and I am glad it did because it means we don't live downtown, it means our front yard is a field of horses, followed by a line of trees, followed by a slope, followed by another field of horses, followed by more trees and then the river and then, wait for it, MOUNTAINS!

For example: Early this morning I was outside and I noticed a single line of footprints in the snow. On closer inspection, Squanch attributed them to a fox. This fox makes up the bulk of the traffic in front of our cabin for the last week. Of course there are Raven's in our airspace, they heckle us from time to time, but I can deal with that.

Life without running water. RADICAL Eh? Apparently. It's one of the first things that came up when the issue of a certain neglected northern reserve close to a diamond mine was in the daily news. "How do they live? How deplorable for the government to let them live like that!" I have never been to this reserve, and I don't mean to belittle the issue, but whenever I heard mention of the no running water detail my first thought was: "Big deal."

Because it really isn't a big deal for us. Of course this is only because there are many places we can go to acquire free, clean, safe water.

• BLUE JUGS - Drinking, dishwashing, sponge bathing, face washing, teeth brushing. We have about 6 of them and we refill them at a nearby service station (gas / convenience / laundromat / showering place) where many other beardy locals draw water from as well.
• LAUNDROMAT - Laundry and showering facilities for Me (same place as above)
• WORK - showering facilities for Squanch
• RIVER - summer supply of all non-potable watering needs such as: laundry, watering garden, showering in the bathing house equip with a woodstove for warming water, and this spring, will be equip with a paloma for on demand water heating purposes (all those treeplanting camps we lived/worked/ran are coming in handy). 

Let's be clear:

I miss bathtubs. Words cannot express how spectacular baths feel when you can't have one at will. I am getting goose bumps just thinking about it. Today, I'm listening to Greg Brown while making lasagna and trying to keep the baby happy aka alive and there is a line in one of his songs "I want to buy you the biggest bath tub in the world." And to me, right now, those are the most romantic lyrics ever.

living at the cottage

Home right now  (taken before the snow came, forever ago in fall)

I've spent some of the happiest times at cabins and cottages and I've always wanted to live in one, didn't see why people kept them tucked away as sacred weekend and holiday places, when they could have that feeling all the time and live there.


And so when I get the sense from people that they think I am roughing it HUGE - like impossibly HUGE, like "you have no fucking running water? how do you bathe? where do you go to the bathroom? BUT YOU HAVE A NEWBORN BABY!" - I just have to laugh  because our life is so amazing, so steeped and strong with everything good and everything I believe in.

You may have a cottage or a camp. If not you may have been invited to one at some point in your life. How restorative do times spent in these outdoor focused places feel? How warm and calm and gooey do you feel hugged in the arms of logs, of wood, of the stuff the trees made so you could have a roof over your head?

privy to my privy

Open the door, leap down the two steps of the porch, round the cabin, down the path made in the snow by feet on so many similar pilgrimages, hug bare arms against the cold, open the latch, fling open the door, throw your pants down to your knees (not ankles), don't look down, sit on the clever pink foam warm in the place of toilet seat, pee or poo, more than likely poo, and as you do contemplate the constellations of purposeless tacks in the back of the door where copious amounts of "stupid-ass- sayings" used to reside, put there by someone else.

Somebody else's sayings... Eff that. No, thank you. I'd rather this door be blank than full of Oprahesque phrases and witty Bill Cosbyisms. I'm going to put a pen and paper in there so we can add to the sayings  at our leisure. Will keep you posted on new turd-bits of wisdom so the stupid-ass-ness of the saying are kept in check.

Air freshener in the freshest air in the world. What overkill. I love how nature is making fun of the tree smelling thing by hanging it's own little version adjacent. Our hole doesn't stink unless the frozen poo stalagmite that gets formed from the outhouse not being properly centered over the hole has built itself up close to the opening. Then Squanch has to wait until it gets warm enough to budge it with a broken shovel we used for poolagmite removing purposes only. Too much info, perhaps? Well, just be thankful I didn't take a photo of the glorious thing.