our days before we knew

on the way home from mahone bay, we stop at a roadside flea market and watch offbeat vendors with the knick knacks of their trade. tea cups, war memorial metals, books long-bought and never read. pennies the pound, two dollars a dozen; this smells of basements and summer haze and the cheap claptrap blues.

beside a bridge and below oaktrees,
i have found a new & secret land.
it's a place of tiger-striped rocks,
giant ants, blackberries, acorns, lichen.
if i ever need to be away,
we will bring blankets here
and lie side by side on the rocks: us
& trains & the glow of city stars.

i read in a book that love is arms open so let's hug like we're airplanes.

the boy who sits on his front door stoop is moving & he just wants to know my name.
black cats that cross my path just want to play. and i want to walk forever and to listen.

us of the rainy day roadtrips

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the tide goes out & the bottom of the ocean becomes a planet...

you surrender to the sleeping

music: hold on, hold on - neko case
books: shop girl, steve martin (also scott pilgrim 2)

hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on...
today my horoscope told me to undo the mistakes of april but i think my failings have undone themselves before me, already and so simply.
visitors and the ones who will stay begin to filter into the solitary spaces of my summer. it has been a season without finale and without much flourish. but completion is false comfort and the tangent lines spread out & forward & beyond with such rare, wondrous potential. potentially. it's time to start telling my small stories again.

i am almost almost here.

making friends with changelings

music: the hours, philip glass
reading: the penelopiad, margaret atwood

in the mornings i costume myself. i hold my hands delicately as unfledged wings and i wander these streets. or to balance these careful toes on slick railway tracks. i am picking strageling wildflowers and i let them fall from my fingers into the glassy sunset ocean. there's salt in the air. all is calm and unclear. there is nothing here to worry for.

more later.

you'll find us in these absences

reading: the tale of two families, dodie smith
watching: les choristes

things have been going along quietly, quietly here. these weeks are pigeons clustered in the gardens and wild rhodedendrons. i have been watching closely for their blossoms with my intemperate ontario eyes. they bloom more showy, more colourful, more fantastically than i imagined.
i have been out and about and have not taken much time to sit home and catch up with long distance voices or even my own close-kept. i've let this project slip too, excused by a constant inability to upload photos. this will be the way of things until september. this morning is cold and rainy and neta and i sat in the kitchen before work, eating oatmeal and gossiping about our last night dreams.

i've been feeling fragmented, unsure of all that is happening around me. unsure of how i ended up here and of this trip by motorbike across bridges and the harbour. the feeling of wind in my mouth and the velvet of your back to hold onto against a speed that will threaten us with flight. my heart's not in my mouth & much more, my heart's not here with us. the ocean waves are small waves and this moment is very much a now, a now, a now.

the miracles are being unrecorded

song: winter summer summer fall, the postmarks
mood: intangible

winds are winding through blossom branches and we're holding our empty hands to snatch away the melting flowers! the glorious, lovely azalea-tree in the public gardens has carpeted the lawn in purple and forsythia leaves force past their lemon-yellow flowers.
these sunrise-sunset days are speeding by so fast. ruth was in halifax for the weekend and we had couch-curled afternoons with music, magazines and the stories that we'd missed. it is good for the flat to be more our place (minus melissa) than mine alone.
friday was an adventuring-afternoon: we wandered through shops and streets for the sake of each other and not just for the company. after coffee and comfy-chairs at uncommon grounds and cheesecake at dinnertime, we joined a punk-rock concert in parade square and sat with the duct-tape clad protesters. and in a flowerprint dress under the rain, i made friends with a black lab who barked in time to grunge guitar. later, with feet dangling over the edge of the dark harbour, we watched cold night cigar smoke & the wide reflections changing colour with streetlights in dartmouth. we will not forget the small and spontaneous.
i am settling in more and more and you will keep coming round here with hopeful eyes. but i am not hoping for this. today, an old woman told me all about the ways of the lonely. she said, "you're just a slip of a thing, you're a child."

when it's done i'll drink champagne to the lonely.

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read: the assumption of the rogues & rascals, elizabeth smart
hear: at the finish line, jenn grant

yesterday morning, i stubbed the end off my baby toe. i was walking toward the livingroom couch, sipping a cup of tea & stepped into a coffeetable trunk we rescued from a rainy midnight curbside. at first, it hurt so much that it didn't hurt at all. i could only watch the shock-white numbness of my raw, discovered skin. then a seeping flush of pink and candy-apple blood to blot away with papertowels.

my worn-in shoes rub and i am thinking not to limp.

we're made of dreams and bones

mood: so much is stillness
song: on the basis, forest city lovers

finally i have words back to myself, and perhaps soon the photographs will follow. mum spontaneously jumped onto a plane and came to visit. we have had a wonderful weekend with brunches and breakfasts for us and found decorations for the flat.
today we walked to point pleasant park and sat on a rock overlooking the ocean. we talked and made a mosaic out of the mussel shell sands. some pieces are pink and white but most of them, most of them are blue. on the way home, we bought lobsters and fiddleheads and ate them for dinner.

ah, beh, veh