lights go off around you like some, photograph...

It's 7:30pm and the temperature outside is absolutely perfect. I'm sitting on the back porch drinking beer that was a gift from a friend, listening to Blue Rodeo and watching our cat Henk jump on the yellow leaves that are punctuating the still very green grass. The heavy frost last week took care of most the bugs that would still be out and so the perfectness of this night is not lost to any buzzing or swatting. It's quiet out, only a few vehicles coming past and the strings of Blue Rodeo's "What Is This Love" are filling the space between the porch steps and the tree branches that arch over the roof and reach past the fence. I'm sitting in a t-shirt and shorts and the weather is just right where I'm not cold or too hot. Jodi finished work and came to sit out with me. I like living with my cousin. She's really full of energy and life and I like her being around. A few years ago she did the same job with King's that I do now. In some ways I think she was better at it than I am. Jodi gets people excited about things, and I am more apt to make people think about things than get them excited. Maybe we should have done the job together. Well, I only have about 4000 photos to work through so I should stop sitting around on the porch spilling stream of consciousness onto this blog and get back to work. I just am hesitant to let this moment end... . . . . . . .

that's when i miss you...

can't get enough of this song.

do you care if I stayed.....

I've really started to love biking. My car has been out of commission all week and its probably the best thing that's happened to me lately because I've discovered that I LOVE biking. Last night I biked to Whyte to meet Sarah Choi for a pint and as I rode through quaint residential neighbourhoods and messy back alleys the sun kept angling lower and lower until I pulled into the last back alley just south of Whyte. There were puddles in the pot holes and the sun shone straight along the brick walls and the streamers from the car dealership were shimmering and whispering in the wind and I cruised towards the sun with the slow shwipp-shwipp-shwipp sound that my chain makes following my shadow across the rutted pavement. It was beautiful.

run, run, run, run, run, run, keep running back to me....

I'm back at home in Edmonton. For the first time in over a month. My car is dying and so until I can get it into the shop, I'm using transit to get around....which I usually enjoy but today it's raining. Quite a bit. Pouring actually. I've thought about buying an umbrella about 25 times this summer but never have...a fact that I'm regretting now.

I stood on my porch this morning watching it come down on the half mowed grass in my yard, on the pavement and sidewalk outside my fence, on the wheat fields across that road....it sounds beautiful. The eaves are overflowing now and a sheet of water is pouring over the steps up to the house. The wind is picking up and it looks like a hurricane out there. I'm listening to Basia Bulat's "Run" which I first heard last weekend at Edmonton FolkFest. A seriously beautiful song.

I'm trying in this moment to stay in the present, but so much of me is pulling forward into the future to see another moment like this. Another moment when I'm standing watching the rain and music is playing somewhere else in the house and Patrick is sketching something at the table and the kettle is going on the stove.... And so much of me is pulling back into the past, watching the snow fall from the kitchen windows in Reykjavik, listening to Patrick Watson, processing photos, feet up on the heater.... I find I just can't stay in one place in my mind. I've felt like this before; then I went to Bangladesh. And later again, and I went to Iceland.

Better start saving for a trip.

how near, how far, how near boy, tell me how far.....

I'm on a train cruising through the outskirts of Montreal on the way to Belleville. It's still quite light out but you can tell its getting to be softer light, evening light. I'm listening to Cinematic Orchestra and every so often I can hear the train blowing its arrival. The old churches and 100 year old brick apartment buildings are thinning out and I'm beginning to glide through forest and field and rivers and small town gas stations that pop up along the tracks. The corn is almost as tall as the young trees already out here and the light catching their tops as they bend towards the train in the wind is stunning.

So far this week, I've been in Fort McMurray, Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg and Montreal and have had no access to internet in the past 5 days....so where do I begin? Maybe I'll just give a few highlights. A week ago Patrick and I were camping in the middle of a gorgeous forest outside Ft McMurray. I loved it despite the off and on weather and it was such a beautiful way to be just the two of us for a few days before his new job and my new job keep us apart for 6 months. After that I came home and packed and K-fern came a took me to the airport the next morning. I appreciated it because it's a pain to get the shuttle to the airport and its expensive to take a taxi or leave my car for two weeks but most of all, it's just nice to hang out with her on the way there and so I left Edmonton feeling good.
I spent 3ish days in Winnipeg, and there were lots of good moments but I think the best was when I met up with Jamie after her night class and we went out for supper at Stella's. The food we ordered was great and we drank and talked and enjoyed each others company until we were the only people left in the place, until the waitress asked us to settle up, until they started mopping under our feet. We then made our way home in the humid, Winnipeg night and fell asleep with Jayda the cat purring between us.
In Montreal I saw Geneva, who I haven't seen in a long long time. In years. I fell in love with the city immediately. It rained a lot. Probably every few hours. It would be hot and sunny and beautiful and then you'd hear a peel of thunder and you would hardly have time to run to any kind of shelter before it POURED for 20-30 minutes. A lot of Geneva and I's exploring was interrupted by this weather and we spent a lot of time hovering in the doorways of businesses and bus stations and bars. On friday night we went to a few bars in Old Montreal and found one we really liked. St Paul Pub is just a door on the street but it opened up into a beautiful second floor pub with window seats over the port and the street. Margaret was our server and was super sweet. We came back to that place this afternoon and spent most of our time drinking Creemore and watching the street below with the place mostly to ourselves.

And now I'm on the train to Belleville to spend some time with the Kerbys. I really love the train and I'm really loving Quebec and so it makes me really happy to be rounding out this week sliding across this landscape with this beautiful, soft light. These are the moments that I wish I could take everyone I love and share this with them.

and when you let go i will let go too...

JULY 10, 2010

We’re in Gregoire Lake Provincial Park. We came to stay two nights. This may have been a mistake. Yesterday we were still in the beautiful Sir Winston Churchill Provincial Park (an island in the middle of Lac La Biche). By 9 am there, we were in swimsuits and flipflops, thinking about having an ice cream and walking along the beach. We stayed only one night there. That WAS a mistake. We got to Gregoire about an hour before the rain, stepping out of our car and changing hurridly into warmer pants and sweaters. The tent was set up on the only available surface, gravel. Patrick jimmied up a tarp over the table with what little rope we had and a stick from the dense forest surrounding us. The trees are mostly poplar. Reaching bare white bodies into the sky until a scraggly mass of braches and leaves decorate its top and make them sway dangerously in the slightest wind. When the rain came it poured angry, giant drops and creating rivers and ponds under our tent before the clouds started to break apart twenty minutes later. I used the back of the axe to dig trenches away from the largest lakes under our tent. After the skies cleared, the wind picked up and it continued to rain from the leaves at the tops of the birches waving in the wind. The fire was doused by the rain, the remaining wood wet, so Patrick and I crouched at the table under the tarp playing rook until it was too dark to see. Then we took cover in the tent and read Emily Carr by flashlight until we were too tired to talk.
Today the rain came off and on between breakfast and the early afternoon when we decided to take a nap and ended up sleeping through most of the only sun we’ve seen here so far. I woke up warm from the humidness of the tent and went to put on shorts. Patrick is gone to collect our daily allowance of wood, “only two buckets night, only available from 5 to 9 and don’t park in front of the gate”, and I’m watching the clouds swirling past those swaying birches trying to calculate how much time we have before it rains again. Blue Rodeo is playing out from my speakers and over it I hear the wind making its way to me through the underbrush. When it hits me, it’s cooler than I expected. Patrick drives into our site and starts to unload the firewood. Time to put jeans back on and pull things back under the shelter of the tarp.

the sun is up, the sky is blue, it's beautiful and so are you...

I'm driving almost the whole length of the province of Alberta this week. Today Patrick and I are making a day trip to Fort McMurray and later this week I'll be driving south....way south....to shoot a wedding. Right now we're somewhere between Fort McMurray and Lac La Biche taking highway 881 which keeps turning from a small paved road into a large highway and then back to the small two laner that will take us most of the way home. Forest and lakes have been lining the road all the way there and back so far, but my favourite I think is the forests of dead evergreens...all still staning, all with little tufts of vegetation at the top. They look like a swampland of giant cattails. Along the highway, on a large patch of bare ground someone has taken long pieces of these dead trees and spelled out C+M. I like that someone took the time to stop and do that. We're listening to the Beatles and the sun is streaming in and the window is open and we're singing along. I'm loving this moment and trying to hold on to it in my mind because this roadtrip represents the beginning of a 6-month separation. And though I know that I'll still be seeing Patrick every few weeks, it's the everyday things that you miss and that make you lonely. No spontaneous movie watching on saturday afternoons curled up on the floor, no coming home from work and drinking a beer together on the porch, no holding hands while grocery shopping.... So today, I'm going to hold on to this moment and try not to already miss him.