Weather Diary - Day 17 (Wednesday April 5 2006 Sun 68F)

'On Home'

Why am I always starving on Wednesdays?

Perhaps it is because I know that the Vegetable Man comes to Ocracoke today, and will be setting up his booth of oh-so-delicious fresh fruit and veggies this very morning. Or perhaps it is a mid-week growth spurt of sorts. Whatever the reason, I begin the (eating part of the) day with a bowl of 'grits'.
For anyone new to this, grits are a real Southern food experience. I have taken to them in a big way. They are comfort food, 'suth-un stahl', but such a versatile food that grits can be eaten with any meal, at any time of day. For me, though, grits are for breakfast. A bit like cream of wheat, but more pebbly and corny. If ordered in a restaurant, grits will arrive with what looks and tastes like a pool of melted margarine on top of the white mound.
More appealing to me is a pool of maple syrup, (sort of north-meets-south in a bowl), and a splash of milk, just like having oatmeal or Red River cereal or cream of wheat back home.

Home.

The maple syrup is making me wistful.
Don't get me wrong. I'm happy that I have brought along my litre bottle of the delicious nectar.
But the taste. Oh my.
I dip out a teaspoonful of syrup, (Chester riveted, watching every move), pop the spoon in my mouth, close my eyes, slowly savour the flavour, roll it over my tongue.
I am back in Ontario in an instant.

It is a crisp spring day. The kind of day when you are too hot in winter garb, and too cool without. It is the kind of day for hoodies, bulky sweaters, mitts and toques. When there is still snow in the woods, and you need to keep moving to stay warm if you are not within a foot of the fire.
I am gathering sap, (at least, the buckets within about twenty paces of the sugar-house), and every ten minutes of so, feeding wood into the evaporator.
Doug is way way off in the easternmost part of the woods, and I can just hear the distant clang of the buckets as he replaces each one on its spile. The snow is still deep enough that you can follow the footprints from the previous day's gathering, like a treasure hunt taking you from tree to tree.
When the fire is good and hot and the sap is boiling hard in the pans, the air becomes sweet and moist, combining with woodsmoke and the scents of early spring in Ontario.
Scents of melting snow, and thawing earth, of rotting leaves and wood, and the first minute green shoots pushing skyward in dappled patches of sun.

So here I sit on Ocracoke Island, in the brightening morning of another blissfully warm southern summer-like day, thinking, (when I should be making art), of home, my beloved woods, my boy. And in spite of being in a t-shirt, denim skirt, flip-flops, in sun and heat and buzzing insects, contentedly enfolded in this place, I do miss home, and that slow gradual almost imperceptible shift into Spring which defines the North.

Chester and I decide that there is just time for one more bowl of grits and maple syrup before we see the Vegetable Man, and then, finally, settle down to work.

Weather Diary - Day 16 ( Tuesday April 4 2006 Sunny and Windy 64F)

'On Reading'

I'm so totally into my book.

I have spent over two weeks now honing and perfecting the best way to make use of the hours in my day.
My daily rhythm, that is, while on this art pilgrimage on Ocracoke Island.
But it is, after all, designed to suit my own interests, and be to my own satisfaction, so if I stray sometimes from its structure, that is okay by me.
That is, except for my one-a-day evening drawing. On this I keep firm control.
It must be done.  On. The. Day.

So here I sit at ten in the morning,
enveloped in the comfort of reading.

I keep up my regime of early morning spiritual reading. It is, I think, just about the perfect way to start the day. (Once the tea is made.) And the term 'spiritual' is proving to be fairly flexible. (Flexible to the extent of including, on this pilgrimage, just about everything I have brought with me.)
So, that includes writings poetic, inspirational, reflective, sensitive, artistic.
And, well, maybe stretch just a wee bit further.

And so, I read:

'The Cloister Walk' by Kathleen Norris.
'Beyond the Walls' by Paul Wilkes.
'Pilgrim at Tinker Creek' by Annie Dillard.
'The Pocket Aquinas'
The Psalms

And regularly dip into:

'The Penguin Book of Canadian Verse' (edited by Ralph Gustafson)
'Donne' (poems selected and edited by John Hayward)
'Search for the Real' by Hans Hofmann
'Hawthorne on Painting' (collected by Mrs. C.W. Hawthorne)
'Sara Midda's South of France'

And here's the stretch:

'The Shell Seekers' by Rosamunde Pilcher
'Sense and Sensibility' by Jane Austen
'Q's Legacy' by Helene Hanff
'Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince' by J.K. Rowling
(purchased at the lovely little Ocracoke bookshop)
'Swallows and Amazons' by Arthur Ransome

But it is the last of these that has me in its grip right at this moment.
I am betraying my art. I am being unfaithful to my purpose for being here.
But I do it out of love.
I am in love with a place and time, with an island, (Wild Cat Island), with its inhabitants, (the crew of the Swallow), and their invaders, (the 'Amazon' pirates).
I can't put this book down until I know if they, (the Swallows), are very nearly duffers. Or not.
(Read book to understand.)
So I read, and console myself with the fact that my 'spiritual' reading does at least involve water and an island, and decisions, and conscience and love.
And it is, oh so nice, to lie in a sunny sheltered spot, (without fear of tornadoes or tidal waves or earthquakes), and read.

Weather Diary - Day 15 (Monday April 3 2006 Tornado Warnings 70F)

'On Fear'

"Do one thing every day that scares you."
 -Eleanor Roosevelt

The day starts out friendly enough.
Pleased with the work of yesterday, in the early hours of this Monday morning I take in the considerable development of my self-portrait at age twelve. And as the day lightens, Chester and I go for a long leg-stretch around the village, ending at the coffee shop.
A medium coffee (with room for cream), a newspaper, a couple of dog cookies for Chester from our friendly porch guys, and a vacant stool in a little patch of sun.
As I work at the daily crossword, I can just make out the conversation at the other end of the porch, in which, alarmingly, I think I catch the word 'tornado'.
Well, nothing so new. There is often weather talk on small, exposed Ocracoke Island - the ceiling, the swell, the sets, small craft warnings. And sometimes even the reminder of shipwrecks along the coast (hundreds), fishing boats late coming in, and unsettling phrases like 'lost at sea' and 'washed up on the beach', all reminders of the restlessness and unpredictability of the sea.
Still, as we walk home, there is a certain humidity and haze which weren't there even two hours ago.

I begin my morning drawing session, but the weather is on my mind. I flip through the 'Virginian-Pilot' to the weather page, and yes indeedy, the weather for the entire Outer Banks area looks extremely unsettled. I look out the window. Can this be?

Not knowing how, exactly, these things work, we stick close to home. And it does cloud over. And there is a breath of a breeze now.
Lunch.
Windy now. Quite windy. And the sky is funny. Not exactly darkening but strangely tinted somehow. It is becoming sort of a greyish... well... a sort of greyish-green.
I turn on the TV, (breaking the rule of no TV until kick-back time). There is a wide band of red crawling across the bottom of the screen. It appears to be mid-message, and I catch the words  '...take immediate cover...'  just a few moments before the message repeats, beginning with,
'EXTREME WEATHER ALERT'.
Oh god oh god oh god. Not that I'm panicking. I pull myself together, and consider bundling Chester and me into the car and heading for, (where?), the community centre. But as I read the message again, it gives advice on what to do, and (very kindly) gives a window of half an hour in which this tornado could happen.
I have 10 minutes.
I find my battery-operated radio, water bottle, blanket, flashlight. I lure Chester into the bathroom, (at the very back of the cottage), with a cookie. We shut the door and wait.
When nothing happens, I creep out and check the TV again. The red warning has changed the time to, beginning right now.
The wind, quite shockingly strong now, is shaking the bathroom window, and I try not to think about the spindly stilts which the cottage sits upon. But it is when I see, what looks like a snowball fight, outside the window, (big big hail), that Chester and I shift to plan B, and get into the closet.

I keep the door tight shut for fifteen minutes or so. As I am sitting on the floor, Chester has his head in my lap, wondering what this new game is all about. I'm wondering that too.
I creep out after twenty minutes. All is quiet. Birds are twittering. A glimpse of sun from the breaking clouds.
The cottage is standing.
Again to the TV, as mercifully the power hasn't been effected. Yes, they declare, it is all over. Having missed us to the north, we just caught the tail end.
I give myself some time to adjust before heading outside, (wishing I had a bottle of brandy, my mother's cure for all that ails you). And that my heart rate would return to normal.

Later, as Chester and I head for the sea in the late afternoon, it is like a different day. Still, sunny, warm.
We pass the hotel run by our friends, and she is outside waving cheerfully at us.
She tells me, with a chuckle, that she and her son were outside chatting when the 'snowball fight' hit, but otherwise seems completely at ease about it all.
I, on the other hand, wish my legs would stop shaking.

Weather Diary - Day 14 (Sunday April 2 2006 Sunny 71F)

'On Self'

I work for most of the day on my self-portrait at age twelve.
I am working on this piece, but for two weeks now, it hasn't exactly been my primary focus. In fact, 'working' may not be the right word. More like staring at it, and occasionally applying a few marks. It is faint and soft and ghostly, but like a seashell washed up in the surf and buried in a thin layer of sand, its form is evident.

My desire is to imbue it with who I am as my twelve-year-old self.
As Neil Young says in 'Helpless',
"All my changes were there."
But it is also true that it will be imbued with the rest of me, as life's experiences have a way of showing up in the most unlikely places.

I work on one small area at a time, in a grid-like manner, like an archeologist exposing the layers. It is, I suppose, understandable, that working on a self-portrait would bring about a certain amount of introspection. And my mind wanders, exposing the layers of what makes a person who they are.
I am working on the portrait of my twelve-year-old self, and I catch sight of a photograph, (part of the inspiration I have brought with me), taped to the wall above my worktable.  In glimpsing this photo, I am taken to events from my past which are linked, (in the funny way of life), first to something which happened six years prior to my twelve-year-old self, and then to six years beyond.

Six years prior. A photo, (this particular photo), taken at Hollow River Falls near the town of Dorset, Ontario. I am six, and stand above the jagged rocks, having conquered the worst of them. Taken by my father on a family picnic, at a place we happen upon on a trip through the rural countryside. I only know where this is, as the back of the photo has, written in my father's hand, 'Hollow River Falls, near Dorset'. A spot we chance upon.

But for me, seminal.

And then beyond. I am eighteen, and working at a summer camp in Haliburton.  On this day, three of us are set free on a day off, beginning at 7 p.m. one day, until 7 p.m. the next.
We do what eighteen-year-olds do on a day off, and hike eight miles, (on the one winding road through virtual wilderness), to the nearest pub. On the way, we drop our gear where we plan to sleep, an open spot by a river about a mile from the pub.
It isn't all clear to me now, but I know that the evening involves people, music and beer.
Somehow, I become separated from my two friends. I wait and wait. The pub closes.
I wait.
When a fight breaks out in the parking lot, I decide, (although not in the best of shape to make decisions), to walk back to the spot where we left our gear.
I go it alone, and meet no one. All the world is black. I have a lighter which seems like a tiny speck of light in a vast wilderness, (which it is).

It is a long long lonely road.

Somehow I arrive, guided by the sound of water. I spend a long time trying to locate our gear, imagining the comfort of climbing into my sleeping bag , pulling it over my head, and obliterating everything.
But it is not to be.
I find nothing but trees, rocks and dewy grass. Nearby, I hear the river tumbling over rocks and, not wanting to trip and crack my skull, I curl up in the wet grass and sleep.

As the world imperceptibly lightens, my two friends appear.  I am not amused, and as they sleep, I hike up the river's rocky edge on my own, and stand looking down at them, where they lie in the grass in the first slanting rays of daybreak.
I stand on the jagged rocks. It is not until long after this event that I realize that my father's portrait of my six-year-old self is taken in this very spot, at Hollow River Falls, near Dorset, this spot where I spend a night alone in the wilderness.

It's not really my way to imagine that my six-year-old self guided me to a safe haven, or that my eighteen-year-old self sensed a connection, but.
Well.
And as I draw, exposing the layers of what makes a person who they are, I wonder at these events, inexplicably linked.
And I draw.

Weather Diary - Day 13 (Saturday April 1 2006 Partly Cloudy 74F)

'On Weather'

I have been here, on Ocracoke Island, North Carolina for nearly two weeks. It is the first of April, and we have moved from spring to summer. Perhaps not summer by the calendar, but trees are fully leafed out, flowers in bloom, the air full of insects and birds and sweet scents, the sea, warm(er).
It all has an island feel.
And if I view all from above,
I see the island, the cottage roof, the green marshy sound-side shore, the wide open Atlantic-facing beach, entirely, (as Piglet might say), surrounded by water.

I am here, witnessing the changing weather. I could sit for hours on my west facing screened porch, and watch the clouds move from mainland North Carolina, across the Pamlico Sound, and over the island, where (though out of my sight), they march either up the coast of out to sea.

I am fully entrenched in my daily routine, my artwork, my spiritual reading, my sea study. I carry on with my early morning ritual, beginning at 5 a.m. I work through the day at a pace which suits me, with lots of time devoted to art and study, food, walks, rest.
I have happily become part of the rhythm of the island.

But from Day One, I have begun to flag when the sun sets. In this way, Chester and I are very similar. We have no interest in exerting ourselves after the sun goes down.
On Day One, a (relatively rare) moment of brilliance strikes me.

I will do one simple drawing every evening.

To facilitate this, I do all of the prep work at the end of my afternoon art session.
Before our long long walk on the beach, before my time of sea study, I do what I need to do to bring my simple evening drawing about.

• Clear my work space.
• Open a 14" x 17" pad of 110 lb. acid free paper.
• Measure out  a 10" x 10" square with graphite pencil.
• Apply masking tape around the outside of the square.
• Lay out my tools: oil pastels, pencils, eraser, ruler, scraper, knife.

All is ready.

And this is how it goes from Day One.
Long long afternoon walk, sea study, supper prep, beer, supper, followed by one 10" x10" drawing done each day.
This day is my thirteenth evening drawing. I draw, and as I draw, I recall my day.
Weather, colours, moods, ideas, readings, all part of what comes through me and onto the paper.
I draw.
I don't over-think it. I just draw.
When I am satisfied, after scribbling, blending, scraping, reworking, I carefully peel away the masking tape border. Not only the most fun part, this peeling is deeply satisfying. I see what is basically a drawing of layered scribbles become sharp edged and defined.
I date it, give a weather report, (courtesy of the Virginian-Pilot), say where I am, and sign it.

And the result is - 'Weather Diary' (Day 13)

The sun has set, the sky darkened except for an orange line on the horizon.  A gentle breeze still holds the warmth of the day. The weather report calls for sun and 71F.
Welcome April.

Weather Diary - Day 12 (Friday March 31 2006 Sunny 75F)

'On Family'
     
A memory.
 I am the youngest of four siblings. The entire family stands outside the front door in the pouring rain, as we have, on returning from a day out, been inadvertently locked out, and no one has a key.
I, the smallest, have been lifted up and into the milk chute, the little cabinet-like box adjacent to the front door, normally used by the milkman to deliver milk and retrieve empty bottles.
On this day, I am delivered through the milk chute, head and arms first, my father holding my feet as I crawl through, until I call out "okay", (as my hands touch the floor inside), and am able to right myself.
I am reborn.

My family.
And a (desperate) act of hope and trust. I am supposed to reach up, open the door from the inside, let them all in and be covered with hugs and cheers.
But I do sense, just for a moment, that I am in control.
It's not often that the youngest has power over three older siblings and two (quite wet and tired out) parents. But, for a moment, I relish my control. For a tiny second, I ponder the repercussions of walking away to my room and leaving the rest of them outside.

I am silent.  And still.  As a mouse.

                                                                           *

For the first time in more than forty-five years, I recall this event. Chester and I are outside the door of our rented cottage on Ocracoke Island.
I can't find the key.
I stand at the door at the top of the outside staircase on the sun-filled wooden deck, turn out my purse and pockets, scan the deck, the stairs, the ground, but no sign of a key.
And I recall that distant, long ago, rainy day of my delivery through the milk chute.
When I was in control of my family.
Family.
I think of the old George Burns line:
"Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city."
I can relate to this, and not just because they are far away.
And they are far away - my parents, gone, my siblings, scattered around the world, my husband, at home tapping trees for maple syrup production in the damp, slushy Ontario spring.
For a brief moment I see myself as a five year old, in control, and for some reason, as a fifty year old, I take it.
On the sunny deck, I gaze mindlessly, lost in thought.  My mindless gaze takes me to the window adjacent to the front door, and I realize that I have left it open. With surprising ease, I climb through it. The key, I see, is on the kitchen counter.  When I open the door, Chester, as if nothing is out of the ordinary, goes to his water bowl, drinks, then curls up on the sofa.
All is well.
                                                                           *
Back to the rainy day of my childhood, and of my delivery through the milk chute.
I peer through the opening, and see my father's face outside, gently coaxing me on.
It is too much for me, as I see in his face the hope and trust, and decide to let them in.
I reach up to the doorknob with two hands, and turn.
It is not the last time that I save the day (in this way), and for this I am grateful.
Give me my fifteen minutes of fame, and I will relinquish control.
At least, for my family.
All is well.