tricotage & temperance

look: the first snow snows
listen: lily, jonquil

the damp smell of winter coats, mixing with dripping glass wires & all the uneven sidewalks. tree branches stretch down like the vertebrae of strange, unfinished creatures, touching telephone lines and the gabled windows of our houses. a midnight bakery warmth drenches the neighbourhood. every morning, r. and i take turns pressing the coffee.

i spent hours walking through the snow, kicking it up from the tips of my rainboots & into the afternoon puddles. this is representative of an aestheticisation of the 'ur-phenomenon,' and negates the intrinsic dualism implicit within a physiological & physical experience of being human. the alternative, of course, is to consider it simply the basis of scientific empiricism --
(i have dreams of orca whales & owls.)

more & more, i catch myself trying to explain things that don't really fit into the con-text of words. romanticism in science, the taste of oranges & chile, the feeling of wool under my fingers.

there is such goodness here.

& i don't know what comes next but there's a stability in motion.
i am excited for uncertainties.

eyes like disappointed lemons

mood: snowsuspecting

-photograph by cig harvey.

this week's grocery list:
parsnips, pinapple, patience,
persistence, persimmons.

mood: streetlamps light the leaves
music: vanilla, miss scarlett

winters begin in november, with sidewalks obscured like tree branches by their sudden yellowing. (this marks our passages through time as seasonal.) pencil skirts & dress-shirts, a whimsical library of greys. we jump into piles of leaves, rustle through the empty streets. a sense of nothing too trivial: when you ask me if it matters, the answer always yes.

-photographs by peter bowers

We rise early, collapsing our tents into sleepy red rock, already alight and glowing with the sunrise. Everything is monochrome, unutterable as the birth of seashell moons. A place consisting of texture: the worn-down igneous folds, the mirrored stillness of water. Human silhouettes lean like saw-toothed pines, always in the act of distancing. Twenty hands grasping at the gunnels, lowering heavy-set canoes into the resiliency of water.

Mostly, I think about granite.

The soft green recedes when you drive north on Highway 69, until coral-coloured cliffs tower over pavement. Rattlers sun themselves in the grooved afternoons, pressing their bodies against the crevices. Wind-swept water and trees, reindeer moss underfoot, the cinnamon-sweet smell of blueberries. Something always raw & unmarred. An emptiness that becomes etched with memory.

she calls this place
a hinterlanding because
it seems a stepping off
to nowhere.