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Colour, Colour, Colour!

I revel in colour. I love colour. I enjoy painting and the natural world around me is a constant source of richness. If everything were black and white or just grey or even only one colour, I would find life very bland. Poor Midas who turned all he touched into gold. No more scarlet or azure or violet. What a sad world! I feast upon colours and I am a greedly little pig about it. I’m not a gardener of any sort, but I gorge upon the gardens of others. I even love the spring dandelions that most homeowners hate. My office is red because red is my very favourite colour, but I’m a fair opportunity employer when it comes to palettes. Bring on the rich purples, the opaline whites, the chocolate browns and robin’s egg blues.

And that brings me to our feast of colour today. Birds. Lots of birds. Birds preening, birds flitting in and out of trees, birds nibbling at the bird feeders and birds strutting their colours. My husband and I had spent the morning at a nursing home where he led the service and we both took part in the choir. Our choir leader and other members had kindly consented to sing their hearts out for the seniors today. After a wonderful morning praising the Lord, my husband and I went on to the tire shop to change our car’s tires over from winter treads to summer. It just so happens that the tire shop is just a few seconds away from a delightful antiques shop/bed and breakfast/tea room. So off we went to enjoy a delicious two hour lunch with a picture window view of their lovely garden full of bird feeders and birds. We had the best seats in the house and while we feasted on cream of lovage soup, salad and quiche (me) and Montreal smoked meat sandwich (Bud,) we watched the passing parade of colourful feathered performers.

While we munched, we observed spectacular rose-breasted grosbeaks, pretty house finches, sunny yellow goldfinches, robins, starlings, blue jays and shiny black/blue grackles. There was a mourning dove as well ,fluffing up his breast on the wrought iron fence. At one point six goldfinch, three males and three females, clung to six different perches of the feeder full of niger seed. It really was a feast for the eyes. We spent our whole meal exclaiming over the beauty of the birds. It was my pre-Mother’s Day treat and I ate up every scrap of my meal and my colour banquet. The two pictures above are my versions of two of those birds, the rose-breasted grosbeak and the gold finch. Wish I could do them justice.

By the way, if you are ever in Williamsburg, Ontario do stop in at the Bed and Breakfast Tearoom and ask for the table by the picture window that looks out on their patio. Be prepared to indulge your eyes and your stomach. Bon appetit!

Cabin Fever and Other Pastimes

I am a great believer in starting something that I want but can’t find. That was how Cabin Fever Club began. I was in need of a distraction, having three children at the time, one of them a toddler. I had about six other friends who also had toddlers so I decide to invite them all for a lunch date. I told them to feed their children first and then to come over for about 1 pm. We set the children up with lots of toys in the nearby living room where we could keep our eyes on them. Then we sat down for a leisurely lunch. I served a salad, rolls and an omlette for the first course and chocolate cake for dessert. I put on mood music and set out the Trivial Pursuit board game just in case we ran out of conversation. After 29 years of Cabin Fever Club we have never needed to open up that game box. We take turns hosting lunch on the fourth Thursday of each month and come Hell or High Water we are there. In our younger days we did all three courses ourselves, but now we share the job. One brings appetizers, one brings dessert and the hostess that month makes the main course. We all bring our latest grandchildren pictures and an appetite.

Over the twenty-nine years we have been lunching we have been shoulders to cry on and the source of many great belly laughs. We have experienced some wonderful lunches; some exotic and spicy, others home cooking with flare. We have gone on shopping excursions, cottage stays, camping outings and skiing trips. We went to a Gatineau Hills bed and breakfast for our twenty-fifth anniversary which was a lot of fun. We also spent a few days at a time-share in the Laurentians courtesy of one of our members. Altogether, over the years we have seen each other through children’s emergencies, teen crises, weddings, and parents moving into nursing homes. We have vowed to continue our once a month lunches even when we are all in nursing homes ourselves. Cabin Fever now consists of eleven good friends and we aren’t above shedding a few tears mixed in with the giggles.

A number of the members of Cabin Fever Club have also been involved in community activities together such as school lunches, pancake days and play days. We have also had a hand in starting a play group which eventually became a nursery school. The play group came about because there was nothing for three year olds to join. Some of us met and decided to begin a group. We got permission to hold it in the basement of a local church and decided that we would all volunteer one month of once- a -week playgroup supervision. We gathered together some gently used toys, a kitchen play set and tables and chairs. Once a week two of us would do crafts, read stories and play games with the children. As time went on we found that more and more mothers were looking for a play group but were unable to volunteer the time because of part time or full time jobs. At that point we investigated how to make the group into an official nursery school so that we could hire an early years education teacher. It took a lot of research and effort but we were able to make it official and for a while the nursery school was in a room of a local public school. This went well as the children then went quite happily on to kindergarten in the same school. The nursery school we established went on for about twenty years until junior kindergarten became a standard part of the public school curriculum.

Some of the “Cabinettes” as we fondly call each other, were also involved in an amateur drama group we called the “Fencepost Players”. A neighbour and I began the group because we both enjoyed acting. We did mostly one act plays, usually two for one performance. We had a great deal of enthusiastic help from friends who made costumes, found props, and designed programs or posters. The group ran for five years, during which time we did about eleven productions. One of the most successful was our first (and last) three act play, “Let’s Murder Marsha” which was a hilarious comedy. I discovered, while taking part in the group, that I enjoyed directing even more than acting. I learned a great deal from those five years and wouldn’t have missed them for anything.

Another venture a few of us took part in was the formation of the Valley Writer’s Guild. Eight of us came together once a month at each others’ homes ,in the beginning, as a group we called “Closet Writers” but as the numbers dwindled four of us decided it was time for a much larger group. We put up posters in the local libraries and drew 17 people to our first meeting. Gradually, over the twenty-two years it has been in existence, our numbers waxed to over a hundred and waned to only five. We met in a room above the town hall, in a college room, in two different church halls and now we meet in the local library meeting room on Saturday afternoons once a month. We have held writing festivals, dinner readings and cabaret nights. We have produced a number of issues of the Grist Mill, a magazine containing award winning prose and poetry and a marvelous newsletter for writers. We have had generous speakers who really gave out of the goodness of their hearts, especially at first when we only had computer paper as a payment.

At this time some of the Cabinettes have been involved in “Country Christmas Remembered” which is a winter festival in Spencerville, centred mostly around the local grist mill which is a museum now. They have also been Friends of the Library and volunteers for the local fall fair. We are a busy group but we have tried to contribute to the community with our efforts as well as do things we enjoy.

Drawing On My Family

What does an artist do when there are no models to pose? Why we draw upon our family members, at least I do. I had this photo of our youngest son taken in a coffee shop and felt inspired to try and capture what is a familiar gesture. Drawing family members has its own difficulties as one’s preconceptions often get in the way. Our mind’s eye is often in opposition to what we actually see. Consequently we rarely can draw the person as we truly see them. However, I think this time I came a bit closer than I have before.

It was the first time that I had used oil pastels in a long time, but my way of using them, blending and layering came quickly back to me. I like working with oil pastels because they smudge less than chalk pastels and they aren’t as hard to clean up after as oil paints. When I’m drawing or painting I go into a trancelike state of pure pleasure. Even when I am struggling with part of a drawing I am enjoying the process. Now that is something I couldn’t say when I was struggling with an algebra problem. Whenever I hear numbers my eyes glaze over. I have to say, though, that I admire and envy those for whom mathematics is an art. Despite the number of engineers in my family tree, sadly I was not blessed with those genes. Consequently I write and draw.

Of course, I can see a lot of places where I have need of improving. I’m not a patient artist, spending days on one piece. I can certainly see the value in it though. I am not so much on details as on the overall patterns and gestures. I admire those who are. My favourite artists from the past are from the Group of Seven and the French Impressionists. I can spend hours in front of paintings by Van Gogh, Edgar Degas, August Renoir and Marie Cassatt. I am entranced by J.E.H. MacDonald, A. Y. Jackson and Lawren Harris, not to forget Emily Carr. Their paintings are so inspiring, but now I have met even more amazing Canadian and American as well as other artists around the world through Facebook and Mixed Media Workshops. Once again I feel the desire to express myself as well and it is a great feeling. I wake up every morning excited to begin the day.

I have posted the photo and the drawing so that you can see what I was trying to convey. Please let me know what you think.

Fun Earrings for Ears Not Pierced

If you are anything like me and cannot have pierced ears ( been there, did it and ended up with a messy infection due to an allergic reaction) or you simply choose not to, you might like an alternative. Years ago when ear piercing was not so widespread women wore clip earrings. You may have noticed that they are almost impossible to find now unless you haunt estate sales, auctions or your grandmother’s closet. I have long admired the cutesy earrings worn by friends who do have pierced ears. It seems that they always have seasonal earrings in their earlobes – Christmas Trees, Easter eggs, Halloween pumpkins, etc. I was envious because I just had to make do with the pairs I had which were sparkly, or the right colours for the season.

Then one day I was looking at some photos of the beautifully knit sweaters a friend had made for my children when they were small. They had puppy, cowboy, and kitten designs on them with buttons to match each design. I remembered seeing other buttons for children’s clothes and even some for adults with interesting shapes and objects on them. Hmm, I thought, I wonder if I could use actual buttons to make some fun earrings for myself. I made a trip to the craft department of a local Walmart and sure enough I found some daisies, yellow ducks, and apples on the button rack. I then searched for the snap-on earring findings. These are a bit harder to find. I needed the kind that have a flat surface on which I could glue my buttons. A crafts store like Michaels is the best place to look, but even then it may be quite a search. The helpful clerk at the store I shopped in suggested a trip to a second-hand clothing store might be the answer. They often sell bags of old clip-on or screw-back earrings for a mere pittance and the unwanted decorations could be removed so that the findings could be re-used.

I did find the kind of backing I needed, so I heated up my glue gun and prepared to make my earrings. The first thing I had to do was take the plastic loop off the back of the buttons. It can be done very carefully with the wire-cutting pliers. All that remains then is to hot glue them to the metal backing. I was a bit concerned that the glue might not hold but I have worn my earrings several times and they are still intact. Use just enough glue to fasten the buttons securely to the backing. Wait until the glue dries completely before trying them on (ear burns otherwise). Buttons with holes are good to use as well. You could always put a small bead in the holes if they bother you, but otherwise, don’t bother. No one will notice and if they do they will simply think it is part of the design.

Have fun making your earrings. Today I found some really great strawberry buttons as well as some with air planes, tugboats, and trains. I also saw (but didn’t purchase) some nice black and white lace designs and some bumble bees and lady bugs. Actually, you might find some great buttons in your own button jar at home. Never throw away a garment without checking the buttons. You never know what treasures you have in your rag bag.

The Importance of the Dash

My Great Grandmother, Katherine Robley

The Importance of the Dash

Our daughter loves to do family research. She has discovered a number of fascinating facts about her ancestors. On her father’s side, her ancestors are mostly Irish, French and English. On my side of the family, her ancestors are English, Scots, and German with a smattering of French. She has discovered connections to some writers, inventors and poets as well as shoemakers, carpenters and shipbuilders. It is amazing to think that our immediate ancestors lived through the plague, many wars and survived sea voyages in a time when they were very treacherous. All that information was hidden in the dash between the dates on their tombstones.

It hasn’t been easy for her to discover these facts. The lives of our ancestors are as much of a mystery to most of us as the future lives of our descendants. It has required diligent searching through posted family trees, sharing info with other searchers, posting questions on the web, looking through the archives, finding old photos and even calling people with the same last name. However difficult, she loves doing it. It is a mystery story slowly unfolding.

The dash between dates is the mystery. That dash is misleading in its simplicity. A lot occurred in that space – first steps, first words, the first everything experienced as well as the last steps and the last words. I look at the photo above, of my great grandmother in the prime of her life, all dressed in the garb of the 1860’s and I wonder what she was thinking as the photographer flashed his picture. I know at the time she was a widow, living in San Francisco where her first husband worked with my great-grandfather as a ship builder. His last name was McGee. He and Great-grandma had a daughter. She and he both caught typhoid and died within days of each other. My great- grandmother was grief-stricken. My great-grandfather, Thomas Robley, had promised his friend that he would look after Great-grandma. so he did. He married her and they had eight children. The two young boys died, but the six girls thrived. Eventually, Great Grampa and Great Grandma returned to Thomas Robley’s home in Pictou, Nova Scotia. It was there in Pictou where the McNabb and Fraser branches of the family had arrived from Scotland on the boat, the Hector. I know Great-Grandma also looked after my great-grandfather’s two older sisters until they died. Did she feel resentful, or resigned? Did she encourage the imaginations of her children? She must have because they were accomplished story-tellers, letter writers, and amateur actresses. We have many photos taken of them in costumes. Did she enjoy being the lady of the house? Did she have a sense of humour? She would have needed one with six daughters to rear. They all had excellent funny bones. What were her hobbies? What were her dreams? You can’t read those things in the dash. How I wish I had asked my grandmother about her mother, but of course, I was too young to know what questions would be important to me now.

So I keep the old photos and pass on as many of the stories as I remember. And I keep diaries for my grandchildren and great grandchildren, so they will know (if they care to) about the meaning of the dash between our dates one day.

In the Soup Pot

Peter Rabbit in Farmer MacGregor's Carrots

Peter Rabbit Eating Carrots by Beatrix Potter
Peter Rabbit almost ended up in the stewing pot at the MacGregor’s farm. There wasn’t much on our land that missed the soup or stew pot when our children were growing up. My husband had a huge garden and with four children to feed we certainly needed it. I was sitting here eating my homemade soup made from chicken, bok choy, cabbage, carrots, onions and orange pepper and reminiscing about the many soups and stews I have concocted over the almost forty-three years we’ve been married. I loved making them and still do. Soup and stew are the greatest user -uppers of left-overs there are. Everything can go into them and they will usually be delicious as well as filling. I say usually, because we all have had kitchen failures which are evident by the fact that the pot remains full instead of emptying quickly.
I see this as an allegory for our lives and therefore the arts. Everything can go into the pot – love, hate, fear, envy, jealousy, challenge, stress, joy, sorrow, pain and ecstasy. If we don’t feel, we’re not alive. The resultant mix of ingredients is the taste of our characters which can be a rich mixture of experience and wisdom or blunder and bitterness. We find out which by the sort of friends we have made in our lifetime. True friends who rally round in times of trouble or fair-weather friends who only stay as long as our money or drugs or booze or food holds out. In the arts, the mix is good when people come back wanting more, patiently wait out our desert periods and cheer on our best efforts. The audience doesn’t need to be large (although that is more financially rewarding) but appreciative.
When I was young I used to go to the library looking for books with happy endings. Now I certainly want Peter to be saved from the stew, but I don’t mind how near he comes to being caught and I’d rather be in suspense about the ending. I don’t want the stew or soup to be bland. There must be spice, and all kinds of ingredients. What excitement would there have been in “Jane Eyre” if she had simply worked as the tutor and never been visited by the mad woman? Would there have been as many “Sonnets to the Portuguese” if Elizabeth Barrett Browning had been healthy all her life? Not that I wish ill-health on anyone, but if it is one of the ingredients in the soup, it should at least be tempered with some great love, passion or high calling. So I suppose, if we fill our lives with good things, things of substance, then we can look upon the sorrow, mistakes, disappointments and challenges as the spice in our recipe, all culminating in a delicious flavour to be remembered and savoured in our later years. It will be a memoir or novel, painting , play or photo album worthy to be handed on to the next generation. A rich soup or stew worth eating.

Inveterate Night Owl

I am the daughter of a night owl and a grand-daughter of a night owl. My children are also night owls. It is truly a genetic strain. It can also be a strain on a relationship, especially if your partner is a day person. Day people do not understand night owls. Any activity after midnight is a deliberate assault on their person. Night life is definitely much quieter, fewer distractions (eg. meals to prepare) and thus concentration is uninterrupted. Besides, my brain seems to get what must be akin to a caffeine kick around midnight. It is very hard to try and sleep when your mind is abuzz with ideas and concerns.

My husband believes that I am a worry wart and I suppose he is partially right. If I am not tired enough to sleep, I spend my time thinking about other concerns.

Earliest Artifacts

Exodus from Aklavik by Mollie Pearce (age 14yrs.)

From the time I could hold a pencil or crayon I would draw. At first it was just circles and then the usual stick people. I was fascinated by grocery stores, so a lot of my drawing involved people shopping and rows and rows of boxes and cans. Well, I thought they looked like boxes and cans however, as I often had to interpret my drawings for the grownups I guess they looked more like just a lot more circles and rectangles.

Then I got a kidney infection when I was six and wound up in the hospital for about a week. It was at the beginning of December and the hospital staff were trying to make things look more “Christmassy”. There was one very talented nurse on our ward who came in on her days off and painted pictures on the windows. I was absolutely awestruck. She asked the children on the ward to ask their parents to bring in some old Christmas cards that she could copy in paint on the windows. She drew amazing (to my eyes) sketches which she filled in with paint. I watched her for what seemed like hours. I thought to myself ‘I wish I could draw and paint like that.’

I also had a grade one teacher that would draw on the blackboard. She drew different things for each month. In April it would be ducks, rain boots and umbrellas. In May it was flowers. Even arithmetic questions were illustrated by objects like apples, teepees, trees and pumpkins with plus or minus signs between them. It was the best thing about arithmetic period.

I filled notebooks with drawings. In grade four one of my friends spent a whole recess and noon hour showing me how to draw a face on profile. After that my glorified stick people became more realistic. Of course, the proportions weren’t right but at least they began to look more human. My parents had to ask less and less about what I was drawing.

By grade eight I was writing a book I called “Pioneer Daughters” (go ahead and laugh). As we were at that time living on the prairie in Regina, Saskatchewan, you can imagine what gave me the idea. Anyhow I spent a lot of time writing and illustrating my book. I designed the dresses I imagined the four daughters would have worn and spent a lot of time on the pictures. That year I was asked to construct the grade eight graduation banner and I loved doing that.

Grade Nine was so exciting for me. For the first time I was taught art by a real artist, one who had a particular interest in mosaics. He had designed four mosaics for the school lobby, two were already in place and he was working on the third. All four mosaics were to illustrate some part of academia. The one that was in progress was all about Socrates and his students. Mr. Miller, our teacher, and some grade 12 students were working on it. That was the year that I discovered oil pastels. The colours and the way they could be layered and blended enthralled me. I drew a picture of women trying on hats in a store (still with the store fixation) and then I decided to branch out.

Our family was a naval family and so one of the postings we had was to Aklavik in the Northwest Territories. I was not happy at the time of the posting as it was interrupting my upcoming Ballet recital, but I was so captured by the immensity, beauty and strangeness of the north that I soon accepted my disappointment. I was not destined for the stage. The north captivated me and so when I was trying to decide on what to draw I thought of a school trip we had taken while I was there. Our teacher had taken us out of school to the river where we watched an Inuit woman cutting up a seal. She was using the uniquely curved ulu (woman’s knife) and was carving up the seal very efficiently. That scene was the one I chose to make an illustration of. I wanted a lot of paper and so I used paper from a large roll of butcher paper and oil pastels. That picture was one of three large pictures with the arctic as the subject. Somehow that picture got misplaced after it was marked. I did two more large pictures: one of the processional at the Anglican Church “All Saints” and one of the shocking oil tank explosion in Aklavik which we witnessed when the townspeople were evacuated (picture above text).

At the end of the school year Mr. Miller asked me if I would like to help work on the huge mosaic during the summer and of course, I said yes. It was very flattering to be trusted to cut and place the glass and ceramic tiles in the pattern he had set out. I worked on it about two hours a day for several weeks until, once again, Dad was posted, this time to Ottawa. I was thrilled to do it and I was able to work along side a grade 12 student. Some day I would love to go back to Sheldon Williams High School and see the mosaic I worked on so long ago hanging there in the lobby. That would be a thrill, even though I was just one of the unsung students who donated their time to work on the mosaics.

Word Addiction

My name is Mollie and I am a word addict. It is a daily habit, I’m afraid. I read everything in front of me; the backs of cereal boxes, the sides of aerial sprays, the contents of tins, newspapers, and catalogues. I love catalogues. I collect words; big words, small words, unusual words, outdated words, even foreign words. I play word games; Scrabble, Words With Friends, cross words, scrambled words, Balderdash, Lexulous, and any other word game that comes into my range of vision. I love the look of words, the shape of words and the sound of words. A blank sheet of paper is exciting. I could cover that page with words, in different patterns, in different forms of poetry or prose, even in different colours of ink. I get excited when I visit someone who has magnetic words to make poetry on their refrigerator. I spend hours working with words, typing them out, writing them down, turning them around. I’m a word manipulator. I mainline dictionaries and the thesaurus. I love the phone book and the world atlas because of the names of people and places. It’s an incurable habit.

I would love to say that my addiction only affects me. Unfortunately, this is not so. My addiction causes me to delay meals, neglect laundry, ignore dust bunnies, and burn baking. It is a terrible predicament but, I’m incorrigible and unrepentant. When it comes to words, I am totally uninterested in a cure.

The Most Important

The most important aspect of my life is my faith. I love my family very much, but before my family I had God and because God gave me my family, He knows how much they mean to me. Yes, I think of God in the masculine gender, which I suppose is the traditional in me, but I am simply echoing the words of Jesus. In my mind, God seems beyond “gender”, a combination of the very best characteristics of father and mother, but it is easier to choose the masculine pronoun than to quibble over English semantics. Besides, we are all made in the image of God, so obviously God must embody all those qualities that are most admirable about men and women.

On the other hand, applying human characteristics to a being so incredibly powerful and creative is very simplistic indeed. The universe is immensely mysterious and seemingly limitless. It is really beyond human understanding. Even if it began with a big bang as scientists believe, what was the initial source of all that energy? Surely the answer is God.

The universe, infinite or not, is not the sole basis of my faith. I believe in Jesus of Nazareth, and his ministry. When I was very young I used to wish that I had been born during his life on earth so that I could have heard his teaching for myself and have had seen the miracles he performed. I am no theologian and I won’t pretend that I don’t have some dark nights of the soul, but in the final accounting I find more to believe than disbelieve. The Bible is a treasure trove of literature, so even if a person didn’t believe it only makes sense that it should be read by everyone. The prophesies about the Messiah are plainly pointing towards Jesus as are many of the beautiful psalms. I love reading the epistles as well. They are so very real, full of human emotion and practical advice. Relevant, I would say, to anyone’s daily struggles.

I do not wish to force my faith upon anyone, but I think that it is well to know what another person finds important in their lives and upon what they base their morality. “Seek” God says, “and you will find. Knock and the door will be opened.” I have found this to be true. Everyone is seeking, not that they know what they might be looking for, but everyone is looking for meaning in their lives. I believe that we are here on earth to learn to love one another and that takes a whole lifetime. We need to progress beyond self-preservation to selfless service. What a different world that would be!

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