Musings at Breakfast

This morning at breakfast, my husband put on a Santana CD that we discovered in a box. With a whoosh, the music from the 60’s carried me back to my primary grade school and to the sleep-overs at my best friend’s house. Her name was Cotton.

Now there was an artsy family! Mrs. S and Cotton and her 2 sisters were all artists. They were always making stuff: drawings, paintings, jewelry, paper mache, macramé. They wore fashionable mini skirts, and big earrings, bikinis and low-slung blue jeans.  Mrs. S always had a book and a sketchbook by her side.   She would sit for hours at the table, smoking, sipping wine, talking about colour and travel and dreaming out the window. Rock and roll music throbbed out of the stereo. (Was it Santana?) More than once, I caught Mrs. S dancing with her boyfriend J in the smoky haze that hung in the air. The house was shabby chic, and so were their friends who dropped in. On weekends, they’d go to the drive-in movies. I admired them and their worldly life deeply. When I was 10, Cotton moved away and I lost contact with her and her family.

Nobody in my family smoked and my parents didn’t dance. My two sisters and I wore long, handmade dresses that partially covered the knee, and no jewelry. Sure, we made stuff, too. We learned to sew, garden, and cook. Our meager record collection consisted of hymns by George Beverly Shay and Schumann’s piano concerto in A-major (a favourite to this day.) My mother rarely sat down to rest. We didn’t own a TV and on weekends, we went to church. My family hung out with hard-working, practical, (still very fun and loving) Mennonites. There just was no hope for me as a visual artist.

At first, I missed Cotton. Drawing helped me to feel a connection with her and her family, but I thought less and less about them as time passed.

Forty years later, I visited a relative in Florida. One small painting on her wall was signed Carol S. That was Cotton’s oldest sister!   My hostess had taken a painting course from her in a neighbouring town in Florida. She taught on Thursday mornings.

That Thursday, I was there early and watched Carol set up her class (Was that middle-aged woman really Carol?) before I had the nerve to interrupt her and introduce myself. There was a pause as I watched her reach far back into her memory. “Yes! You were Cotton’s friend. Of course, I remember you!”   We arranged to meet at a café the next day to talk. Cotton and her family had moved to Florida in the early 70’s. Cotton married young, but, soon after her marriage, she was coming home from working late at a restaurant and was hit by a truck and was instantly killed.  Mrs S. was also dead.

We forgot to talk about art.

It’s ironic that I end up being the artist and Cotton of the talented, stereotypically artsy family never got the chance. The injustice and mystery of it hit me anew as I listened to Santana. (What the heck does Santana have to do with reopening these memories?) To what degree did Cotton and her family nudge me into an art career? I will never know. I can just bow my head in reverence to those who cross our paths in life and silently and mysteriously change the direction of our lives or maybe they don’t.

Despite our UNartsy upbringing, three of us four siblings ended up in a career in the fine arts. Who’s to say what the artistic temperament is?

I really must get back to work in the studio.

 

 

 

 

Pink Shoes

It’s a rare event that I cave in to buying something frivolous, just for myself.  I have a big, growing family involved in music lessons, a home, a business of my own, my husband’s business.  There is never anything left for foolish indulgence.

The bright pink shoes on the display table were made of the softest leather, leather lined and leather soled.  They were my size and they were on sale. I imagined myself wearing them on Easter Sunday, with my fuschia-coloured dress. I pictured them, casual style, with tight jeans and a bright shirt.  I felt them moulding perfectly to my feet as I met clients in my studio/gallery.   They were like two bright spring tulips in my garden, like two punchy blobs of paint on my palette.  I left the store and dreamed of those shoes for a month.

I blame the barrel for my weakness for unusual shoes.   I must have been eight when my father announced after supper that he had a surprise for us.  We were to wait for it in the living room.  I heard a distant rumbling coming closer to us down the long hallway.  Dad rolled the barrels into the living room, popped off the lids and dumped out the contents all over the living room floor.  Shoes, hundreds of leather shoes, poured out – red, pink, shiny patent black, pointed, squared-toed,  buckled, laced, buttoned, strapless shoes.  It was raining shoes!  Shoes flooded the floor.  The river of shoes flowed down the hallway.

“Help yourselves!”  my father magnanimously offered with a delighted chuckle as my mother gasped in astonishment.  “Harold, what have you done?”

While my siblings and I charged in like hungry children on a plateful of doughnuts, our father explained how the shoe store in town was closing and the owner had offered Father a deal — $5 a barrel of shoes.  It was the ’60s and Father had a big family and was the principal of a private college.  He often had students in need.  So, he bought the whole lot.

But there was one catch.  There were no two shoes that matched exactly.   Some came pretty close, but the shade of brown was slightly different or the buckle on the left shoe was bigger, or the right shoe had two straps instead of one or the left shoe was size 5 and the right was size 7.  It wasn’t that noticeable if you didn’t stand at attention, feet touching.

From then on, whenever I needed a new pair of shoes, I went to the barn instead of the shoe store and rummaged around for a  passable pair.  Often, I had to polish them to make them match better.  Whenever Father’s students or our own friends came over, we would casually offer them a new pair of shoes as if were a glass of water. It was always a frenzied treasure hunt to find the closest match and the best entertainment we could offer our guests.  Over the years the cache of shoes dwindled until the last of them went up in flames the night the barn burned down.

One thing I learned from that barrel of shoes, is flexibility.   You can make do with whatever you have.   With a bit of imagination and some shoe polish you can make things work.  You can put up with a little discomfort for style.

The pink shoes were still there last week – the very last pair on the sale table  They were a little tight, but I knew from experience that that wasn’t a big problem.  The leather would stretch.   They were outrageously pink, extravagant and beautiful and a barrel of fun to wear on Easter Sunday.

A Different Kind of Landscape Painting

“All gardening is landscape painting.”

Alexander Pope

My mother grew a huge vegetable garden in which we four children had to put in a certain number of hours of planting, weeding and picking.  My favourite memories of the garden concerned peas.  I loved planting the peas.  They looked like soft green buttons  sewn on the umber-coloured shirt of a sleeping giant,  and I was the seamstress as I dropped each pea- button, one to two inches apart, into the trough.   When they grew into plump pods, I’d eat them raw, cramming whole fistfuls into my mouth.  No snack can compare to those freshly shelled garden peas.   Even the pods were delicious, once you peeled off the inner membrane.

It took me many years to have a vegetable garden of my own.  But now I have one and it is a miracle.   Two years ago, my husband and I purchased the  land on which my husband’s business sits (Portico Timber Frames).   The soil itself is mostly sand and rock – fill that had been dumped into a swamp.   But  the site has sunshine and it is flat, both rare features in Muskoka and the Haliburton Highlands and I began to dream of the possiblility of growing a garden there.    Since the soil grew scruffy weeds, I wondered if it might just grow vegetables, too.  I could just see that desert bloom.

After reading Patricia Lanza’s Lasagna Gardening,  I went to work trying out her no dig, no till, no weeding system of gardening.   After mowing down the weeds and grass, my husband and I built long rectangular boxes with wood from Portico’s scrap pile.  I lined the bottom with 4 sheets of wet, overlapping newspapers to kill the growth.  On top, I dumped layers of manure, coffee grounds from Tim Horton’s, peat moss, chopped leaves,  straw, top soil, compost, anything I could think off that might make a good soil.  Then, I sowed my seeds, flowers and veggies all mixed in together.

Today, it is a verdant, bountiful garden that feeds my family all summer long and provides a quiet and refreshing place where people can stroll and rest in.  Much more has grown up in this garden.  My daughter opened a wood-fired pizzeria in my garden (mypizzaonearth.com).  My new studio opens out onto the garden.  My husband and nephew built an English-style brick pathway and patio in the garden.  My little garden developed further to include a burgeoning Dorset community garden where members meet to garden, trade plants and gardening tips and to socialize.   Birds love to visit the garden, too.  Miracles do happen. Deserts really can bloom.

As I dropped the peas into the soil this afternoon and was transported back to my mother’s garden,  I looked up at my own beautiful garden with is tall spires of garlic, its deep blue irises, its bright yellow-green lettuce, and fragrant herbs. I realized that, while I paint for a living, I now live in a painting.  My surroundings are also my canvas.  Gardening is just another form of landscape painting.   No wonder I am totally absorbed by it.