when landscapes sleep

There is a time, between night and day, when landscapes sleep.Only the earliest riser sees that hour; or the all-night traveller, letting up the blind of his railway carriage window, will look out on the rushing landscape of stillness, in which trees and bushes and plants stand immobile and breathless in sleep - wrapped in sleep, as the traveller himself wrapped his body in his great-coat or his rug the night before... All night - moonit or swathed in darkness - the garden had stayed awake; now, after that night long vigil, it had dozed off.

Nomenus
Tom's Midnight Garden

Loonie

A Canadian loon for luck and nostalgia. By Adornments NYC

the reader

Before I was anything else, I was a reader. During my childhood Saturday mornings would find me, then toward ten o'clock, still in bed and reading. Always pale and absorbed, I read in a grim kind of way, with a cup of chocolate grown cold beside me. Despite cries of "get up sleepyhead" coming from down the hall, I would read on, mechanically twining my long braided hair around my wrist and sometimes looking at my sister or brother with the unseeing glance of the obsessed.

Now as an adult I still read in a grim kind of way. I have responded to my own child's cries of "look at the rocket, mama!" with that unseeing glance, that ageless glance of the obsessed, full of obscure defiance and an incomprehensible irony. Like any other reader, I am susceptible to romantic insomnia. This past week I induced it in myself with the following: The Thirteenth Tale (this started the madness), Jane Eyre, Le Grand Meaulnes (this fed it) and Tom's Midnight Garden (for the child). I tried sprinkling Bright Star into the mix but I am a reader, not a film girl. I am exhausted...

Anyway, I recommend all of the books listed above if you find yourself with a hankering for secret gardens, troubled families, confused identities, crumbling mansions, and tragedy. My only warning is that you may find yourself drinking lots of hot cocoa as you go.

a token

My lady
fair with
soft
arms, what

can I say to
you—words, words
as if all
worlds were there.

A Token by Robert Creeley

Image via

channel black

Inlet into from
the way a river does,
the mouth of a black dog
lapping
at the bowl of the bay.

The same kid
always wins at monopoly,
shows up in the right
wrong places,
another makeshift town

tucked in his pocket.
Fog, that thief,
unravels landscape,
changes the rules,
watches the bank,

chasing an orange dog,
a crown,
a boat with a single oar,
a bigger boat,
the rising tide.

Channel Black by Valerie Lawson 

Image via Sabino

the last few days

We are in love with Vancouver Island. We finished the last few days of our summer eating oysters, collecting shells, and watching the seals and whales. I found Lisa Hebden's work one night in the Sooke Harbour House. Would I dare to move to such a beautiful place?

Painting "The Dare" by Lisa Hebden