Dramatic Monologues

In my line of work, I have witnessed some amazing performances. People seem to treat the library as something of a confessional Occasionally, it feels like I am the audience in a one-man or one-woman play! Enter Stage Left! Hold Forth! as the audience sits in stunned and wondering silence. They gesture, they fume, they sit on the corner of the desk and chat away about the vicissitudes of their lives...husbands, wives, children, erstwhile friends, illness, sorrow, tall tales of adventure. They always leave feeling better. Sometimes I feel like Lucy Van Pelt!




It would be unethical to share anything but my amazement, but I do have another dramatic monologue, delivered by my aged English cousin, Gwen, many years ago, which so impressed me with its flow and sustained length that I recorded it verbatim in my journal the evening after hearing it. My cousin died recently at a very great age, and I don't think she'd mind being immortalized in this way.

So here goes......

"I used to have a lovely clump of Jersey lilies, but I fear they've all gone now. The big willow blew over in the storm; did you hear about the storm? Terrible, it was; anyway, the branches fell into the lily bed. That and the floods....

Jersey lilies they were; I got them from a friend. She's quite a few years younger than I am; a few, well.....five or six, lets say four. She married a Jerseyman, he's a , well he's retired, but he was a farmer. We call them Gwen and John too. We went out there for a holiday. They have a lovely house, well, the son's got it now, but they have half of the ground floor. They were going to have a small cottage, at the bottom of the garden, a retirement cottage, you know, but they priced it all out and in the end it would have been too much trouble so now they have half of the ground floor with their own entrance, and the son; no , both sons share the rest. Its a long house, very French. We spent a month there. All along the wall there were beautiful flowers, some of them these Jersey lilies; masses of pink lilies.

Just as we were flying out, we were in the house packing up; I was still in me underslip, and the bell rung. A fellow came in with a bag of new potatoes and a great bunch of these plants. As we were driving along the road to the airport, John said to me:"I don't know if we'll be able to take them back in; I shouldn't think so." I looked at him and said "I've got them now, and if you think I'm going to dump them out on the roadside...."

So we brought them home. But they've gone now.



I don't know, maybe you had to be there, but this just guts me every time I read it.

Creative Re-Use

My neighbour has an amazing outdoor rink on which his two hockey-mad little boys, their cousins, and all the neighbourhood kids spend every winter evening using to the fullest. While the more couch potato type kids are inside watching the Simpsons, these little tykes are out perfecting the upstairs shot under the kleig lights. My neighbour faithfully smooths, waters, scrapes, until that rink shines like a mirror. Its a wonderful addition to our neighbourhood.

When spring came early this year, I thought how disappointed he must be to see all that work come to nothing so prematurely. I thought that until this week's heat wave, when the neighbourhood kids all gathered. The rink had become a community wading pool. There was always someone's mom sitting on bench nearby just in case, but everyone was having a whale of a time. Pretty soon the liner will be put away and the boards taken down for another year. But for now, the kids have decided to seize the day!

Quilts of Various Sorts.

I've been known to be a quilter. Not a "quilter" in that sense of having a lovely sewing room with all my fat quarters (look it up, non-quilters) arrayed in precise prismatic order, and all the latest gear for machine embroidery. I like scrap quilts. The ones I grew up with, with printed cotton broadcloth cut either cleverly or economically into kaleidoscope patterns. When we were kids, we used to like to look up through them in the mornings and admire the stained-glass effect of the colours and the seams that became visible through the backing.

I like the idea of quilts that use up every scrap of the useable. "Use it up, Wear it out, Make it do, or Do without" is a saying that could have come out of the mouth of either one of my grandmothers. One had a tinfoil drawer, a ball of elastics, and scads(to use her word) of string. The other was the quilter. I have on my bed, sometimes, the quilt she gave to my husband and I as a wedding present (lo, these many years ago). I had it on my bed for every day of my marriage while she was alive. After she died, I thought I'd better take it off, to better preserve it, but its pretty tattered now anyway, so whenever I feel the need of it, I put it on the bed again. It is a masterpiece of conception and construction. Grandma used the remnants of housedresses, doll clothes (which were probably remnants when I knew them as doll clothes), aprons, curtains, and combined them into pinwheels, masked off by ribands of multicoloured solid strips, on a pristine white ground. Despite being composed of a multiplicity of colours, the whole is perfectly balanced, allowing the eye to wander over the entire surface without distraction. The corners match, the seams, some of which are now visible through lifting patches, are arrow straight, and look as if they'd been cut with a razor; this long before the handy dandy rotary cutters which are the only way I can do this kind of thing. The quilting, done by hand on a frame built by my grandfather, is at least 8 and more often 10 stitches to the inch, and as I can recall from working with her, if the needle didn't make it through all layers, you went back and tried again.

My quilts are more, well.....organic. Yes, let's call it that. I try to keep things on the straight and narrow, but if a seam edge flips over when I'm sewing it, I leave it. My stitch length depends on which needle I'm using and if the television program in the background is interesting or not.

Both Grandma and I learned the hard way that the recycling ethic has a downside. Remnants are ok, but using much loved already used garments can be disastrous, as that patch will wear out before any of the others. Using cheap material can also sometimes let you down. So it is with my quilt. That, as much as anything is why its tattered. The stitches have held, but the fabric has not.

While I was thinking about Grandmothers, I remembered a photo I'd once made for something called Self-Portrait Tuesday, which was a kind of web "happening", which started as blog, became an interactive website, and now, renamed Self-Portrait Challenge, seems to exist only asa Flickr group, though it still maintains its thematic nature. If you Google it, that's where you'll end up. There was a monthly or weekly theme and photographers from around the world would post their interpretations. I made two that are quiltish. One, I called Quilt of Days, and was a nine-patch of images I made of myself and what I was up to for a space of time. I wanted it to look like a crazy quilt.

The other was a collage of images which I called something like "remembering the grandmothers" or "thinking about the grandmothers" or some such thing. Genetics is a bit like quilting really. You take a bit of this and a bit of that, an eye colour here, a quirky smile there, some stature, or not, a laugh, a predisposition to this or that disease, and stitch them together. There's a pattern, but you can change it up a bit. GATTACACGATTA. You know.

And you just never know how the whole thing will come out until its finished!

What next?

I've been pretty busy this week. At various times I've thought, Oh, I'll blog this or that, but have forgotten along the way what was so amazing about whatever it was I'd seen. So I'm working back closer to home. Today's offering is a couple of photographs I took in the newly open yard. That newly open yard which is so full of other blog-stopping things to do. Ai ai ai!

Here they are--a rust spiderweb on the base of an old canning kettle which has been used in the last couple of decades as a flower pot, and the unfurling of the unstoppable rhubarb.

The End of the Ice Age

Maybe I should just change the name of this blog to "My Nature Journal", since almost always it is nature which supplies me with the amazing sight of the day, even though most of what I notice is completely predictable. These things happen every day, every month, every year. What makes them special is when they happen to me, personally. Every year the ice goes out; every year I wait for it, but every year when I see that telltale glitter on the horizon, I think "Oh boy, the lake is clear!" and today was that day. The dog and I ambled down through the woods to take a look. I took the lower trail today, the one that threads its way along behind a mossy granite ridge that we call The Dragon's Back, down to the little point, or the first point as we call it, to distinguish it from The Point, which is our most usual destination. I wanted to take a look at Coyote Rock. When the ice is on the lake the coyotes who live in the 600 acre plot of land that borders the lake use this as their rendezvous on cold moonlit nights. We like to go down there and see how many sets of individual tracks we can identify. Casey prefers the more accurate smell count. Today we saw no coyotes (we never do), but we encountered four geese who, instead of fleeing from Casey's inept hunting technique of plunging through the reeds after them, actually came closer after that. It was nice to lean up against the boulder at the shore and do nothing.

On the way home, I was looking up at the spent seedheads on the lilacs which line the track, thinking how the weathered bronze of the branching pods reminded me of some French Empire chandelier, when I noticed with a shock that there were green buds showing! When did that happen?

The third amazing natural wonder of the day (first chronologically) was a flock of fifty, count'em, fifty wild turkeys in a field between here and Sydenham. Youngest Son, who was a trifle sleep challenged last night, asked me to drive him to school. Those are some really BIG birds. Alas, there is no picture. No camera on board. Darn.

They're BAAAAAAACK

Imaginary Landscapes

The two most striking images of today are in my mind's eye. They come from stories told to me by my friend, Marlene. We were out on the morning dogwalk, feeling sad about the trees the township cut down along our road for no apparent reason. (Rest assured, I have asked for one).
She told me two stories, one of which made me sad, and one of which filled me with joy and nostalgia. The first was about how hot it has become in her home country of Costa Rica. She was raised on the slope of a volcano high in the mountains near San Jose. Her mother recently sent her some pictures of kids playing outside in shorts and spaghetti strap tee shirts. Mom!, are they crazy? asked Marlene... her memories of what she wore while growing up were rubber boots, sweaters and woolen caps. When she was a girl, it was always cool and misty. Her mother told her that since the lumber companies deforested the volcano, the climate has changed a lot. The climate in San Jose, where her mother lives now, is also changing. Because it is on a high plateau fairly close to the equator, the climate has always been steady within a few degrees of 20 C, summer and winter. Last week, it was 35C.

The happier story was also from Mar's childhood. Her grandfather had a finca, a farm in the countryside. Down the laneway was a row of large conifers which had grown so tightly together that they almost formed a hedge. Marlene was lucky to grow up near her cousins, arranged in three groups of four age-mates each, and they loved to play in these trees until they were teenagers. They created their own world in the tree tops , each having a house, with dishes and special belongings. They could move from tree to tree, like squirrels, never having to climb down to go visiting each others houses. Like the Swiss Family Robinson, or the Lost Boys. How idyllic! Life is definitely better with cousins.