May 27th, 2008 writerspice
This past weekend, J. and I embarked on a bit of a staycation.
We still drove three hours to get there, but by creeping along in our fuel-efficient car, we only used about a half tank of gas (the starter went and J. had to replace it in our B&B’s driveway and then the emergency brake kinda caught fire as we were picking Ollie up at the kennel, but, hey, you can’t have everything!)
I’m still working on pitches and stories from the excursion, so can’t say much lest I give my ideas away, but suffice it to say we were in the St. Jacobs area. Unfortunately, we didn’t make it to the market (sources tell me that the 130-year-old Kitchener Farmers’ Market is even better, with more reliably local food and less crap), but Saturday afternoon found us in the village, a first time for both of us.
We wandered around a pottery shop in a renovated silo, sat quietly in a replicated meeting house in a museum dedicated to Mennonite culture and explored a hundred year old broom-making shop and antique store (where I coveted an ornate Victorian twine dispenser made of iron – must be all the Jane Austen I’m reading lately).
St. Jacobs reminded us a bit of Elora, that other once-sleepy Ontario village that came to fame and is now lined with expensive boutiques and crowds of bussed-in tourists eager for the authentic.
Both towns seem a bit like how I would imagine the Southwestern Ontario pavilion at Epcot Centre and over rhubarb-strawberry squares at the bakery, we wondered what the Mennonites think. In the museum, we learned that they were first nick-named “the quiet in the land” when they arrived in the late 1700s. It must be strange for such private people to have to run their errands in a town crowded with people wishing for a glimpse of their black wagons rolling down the road.
We didn’t see many horse-drawn wagons. Mostly we saw buses lined up in the wide parking lot a block from main street and lots of cars, one from Florida. But on the way home we stopped at the Kissing Bridge, the province’s last remaining covered bridge, and as I was snapping photos, one came by. I surreptitiously took a picture – not the greatest one, but you get the idea – before we continued on our way, driving down back country roads with dust around their edges, to wander our way home.
Posted in Ontario, Recommended, Writing Life | 1 Comment »
May 23rd, 2008 writerspice
Last week, I went to the countryside town of Uxbridge, Ontario on assignment. While there, I wandered into Bredin’s Bakery, bell jingling and old-fashioned porch door slamming behind me.
Inside, as a fourth-generation baker toiled away in the background, I tasted some cookies I’m pretty sure they are serving on simple china plates on a fluffy white cloud in, um, heaven.
Here’s a photo of a baked-goods buyer, perplexed over what delicious bit of paradise pastries she should purchase.
Either that, or she’s wondering what I’m doing, bent over, aiming a camera at her face. Ah, well. It made for a good shot of this simple bakery with delicious fare.
I’m glad I went. Who can argue with contented crumb-fingered sighs?
(And, yeah, okay, I guess this is me officially coming-out as no longer gluten-free – a long, controversial story that can be summed up by saying, nobody knows one’s body like the person who has to live in it).
Posted in Food, Ontario, Pretty Pictures, Recommended | 1 Comment »
May 20th, 2008 writerspice
Here in Canada, despite our long-standing sovereignty, we continue to celebrate the birthday of royal monarch Queen Victoria. Known affectionately as May 2-4 (get it?), the long May weekend, which just passed, always reminds me of those oh-so-brief relationships that peppered the tedium of high-school.
You know the type. For weeks before actually getting together, the spirits were drenched in infatuated anticipation. A butterfly broke lose from its chrysalis every time he cast a glance your way in chemistry class. And then, the moment came. You got together with some sloppy dance-floor kisses, only to quickly discover in the coming days that he was either a) drunk, b) actually seeing someone else, or c) really, really into hockey.
We spend so much time waiting – a whole white, frigid winter – for the first weekend of summer and nine times out to ten, those three precious days are still bogged down by bad weather. This year, the annual May 2-4, proved again disappointing.
J. and I had great plans. We were going to head out into the wind for an overnight with my mom and step-dad on our co-owned sailboat. Only problem, the wind would have knocked us flat, to then be pounded by rain, to then be frozen solid by the plummeting temperatures.
Sailing plans cancelled, we were still obligated to bring the canine baby to the kennel. So, we dropped him off and ended up at what we call commerce-land to catch a matinee.
Unfortunately, everybody else in town had the same thought.
We got advance tickets for the early evening show, grabbed a disappointing bite to eat at a nearby cafe and ended up taking advantage of our dog-free time by, um, wandering the aisles of Future Shop, Home Depot, and, yes, I admit it, Walmart, where we purchased a Pyrex measuring cup, some smaller measuring cups and fish hooks. J. also romantically squired me into a Dollar Store where we cruised the craft aisle and he bought a single square of yellow foam and some beads.
After killing those couple hours, we ended up watching that new Patrick Dempsey rom-com, Made to Honor or Made of Honor, or whatever it’s called. Despite the clutch of teenage girls actively pretending they owned the place in the back row, it wasn’t all that bad. The best part? Both the stunning Scottish scenery and beer, afterwards, at a downtown pub where we talked about the movie, writing and extreme wrestling. Mostly.
Once I was stuck in a small village in Argentina with nothing at all to do. So I went to a movie. A scrawled sign on the outside gave the ticket price for something like “a man and his family.” I’m not sure what I paid for the film – that Nicolas Cage one, where he wishes he was single and wakes up into an alternate life without his family – but it was fun and gave me a break from both my solitude and my book.
Yesterday morning, lying in bed finishing up a Jane Austin novel, I realized that sometimes, no matter where you are, no matter what high hopes you have for a holiday, what exotic food is appearing on your plate or what language floats through the air around you, plans just don’t work out and life becomes, well, boring. Back before we had the privilege of easy travel, it was that way more often (especially for women who couldn’t randomly announce they were leaving the children and the spouse to go shoot something in the pastoral countryside and had to rely on needlework to vigorously stab away the time).
That’s just the way things are.
Book finished, I got up and weeded the garden and felt a bit better. And, hey, no matter how many disappointing, sloppy kisses the weekend gave us, it’s still a four-day work-week and nobody can be annoyed by that (well, except maybe Queen Victoria, who, in all her portraits, never really seems happy about anything at all. Maybe she was sick of all that needlework).
Posted in Contemplations, Orillia, Seasons | No Comments »
May 14th, 2008 writerspice
This morning I jumped out of bed at 7 a.m., realizing we forgot to put the garbage out.
My husband took the dog for a walk as I scurried around the house, sweeping every paper receipt, toilet paper roll and stray ice cream container (hey, it’s been a hard week) into the recycling bin. The garbage was easier – tied the bag up, plastered my neon orange city-certification sticker on it and rushed it out to the curb just as the truck was pulling up.
It’s funny the things you never think about when you’re a long way from home, living out of your backpack and steadily disposing of any accumulated waste as you go (or shoving it in your journal to be either scrap-booked back home or thrown out a decade later). I probably desperately need a vacation, but that’s what I was thinking as I breathed a sigh of relief, poured a cup of tea, fired up the computer and entered my Gmail account.
Needless to say, it was nice to move from a meditation on garbage (and, believe me, I could talk a bit more about that if I had the inclination…) to the news that my blog made Travelhacker‘s list of the top hundred travel blogs.
I’m up there with such esteemed bloggers as The Lost Girls, three twenty-something New Yorkers who just, well, took off, Slow Travel, a blog by writer Ed Gillespie who took a flight-free trip around the world, writing columns for the Guardian along the way, and Nerd’s Eye View, where she’s written a great post about how to keep your travelblog alive when you’re not traveling… NOT on the list: talk about the monotonous chores that bind us to home.
Oh, well.
Posted in News, Recommended, Writing Life | 1 Comment »
May 8th, 2008 writerspice
Busy, busy, busy. Working ten-hour days this week, while the world outside shifts between grey skies and sunshine, edged in cold and warm, air weighted in moments with humidity. Off to Uxbridge tomorrow for an assignment, while another lies all over my desk like an exploded bomb.
In the midst of it all, bum sore from sitting on the hard chair, shoulder aching from moving the mouse too much, I take a break and wander over to Flickr, to look at some of my friend A.’s photographs.
They make me happy – these moments she snaps – how she can stop the everyday rush and grab the beautiful, the humourous, the graceful, the elaborate, the simple image out of the obliteration of time and freeze it into something extraordinary.
She certainly has the eye.
Posted in Art, Pretty Pictures, Recommended, Writing Life | No Comments »
May 5th, 2008 writerspice
This Saturday, J. and I took advantage of a break in the rain to head out to Grant’s Woods, a 52-acre section of forest protected by the Couchiching Conservancy, a land-trust organization that oversees the maintenance of several important acreages in and around Lakes Couchiching and Simcoe.
With Ollie on leash, we wandered the 1.5 kilometre Trillium Trail, stopping at several numbered spots to learn about bittersweet vine, yellow birch, salamanders and other facts of the forest. Most of the trilliums are just about to bloom, their tightly-wrapped white flowers waiting for the sun, but we did see a few of the rarer red variety, wide open.
But what I love most about being in the woods on a wet spring day is the smell. Sweet and spicy, that heady aroma of freshly melting mud mixed with sprouting cedar and other awakening wild stuff always reminds me of the very best times in my life – living in a B.C. rain-forest, wandering through the woods behind my childhood home.
And this forest is especially special. Says the website:
“…it is the woodlands on this property that are its true value. Except for the removal of a few dead trees for firewood, this upland forest has not been touched for over a century. The result today is a fine old-growth stand with towering hard maple, white ash, red oak, white pine, and hemlock. The soils here are deep moist sands, ideal conditions to produce tall, straight, healthy trees. They also produce water – lots of small cool streams in shallow ravines, which collect together to form one of the headwaters of the North River. Indigo buntings occur along the woodland edges. In the shade of the forest, Christmas fern and spring wildflowers are abundant.”
With several more trails yet to explore and the changes of the seasons to watch, Jason and I will be back there soon. Maybe even for Mother Earth Day, this coming Saturday (May 10) when local bands will be playing in the gazebo, accompanying a native smudge ceremony by Mnjikaning First Nation elder and storyteller Mark Douglas, a spinner who works with husky fur, snake and turtle demonstrations and bird-nesting-box building for kids, alongside lots of other activities… (for more information, go to the homepage of the Couchiching Conservancy website and scroll down). A great way to celebrate mother’s day, if you’re in the area.
Photograph by Lauren Carter
Posted in Orillia, Pretty Pictures, Recommended, Seasons | 3 Comments »
