Katharine Asals

Just one paragraph

July 21, 2013March 3, 2015 Katharine Asals11 Comments

Too many things to do today.
Too many projects half-started, semi-finished, due, overdue, pending, and promised.
Yesterday, rather than do any of things I should have been doing I read a book for most of the day – a flawed book, with many digressions, yet with vivid characters and a layering of culture and personality and psychology and even a tiny bit of suspense that I just read and read and read and thought yes, yes, this is what it is to read, to dive deep inside an author’s imagination.
And so all the things that should have been done yesterday are also added to today (including grocery shopping, but hey, crackers are okay too) and the pile grows higher, but rather than do all those most urgent things I begin a deep cleaning out of closets and boxes in the basement, looking for old negatives (they must be somewhere, they have to be here), photography I used to do decades ago before digital, searching partly because I’d promised a blogging buddy I’d try to write something for him and maybe if I could find that old photo of the chair it would work with the post, and partly because yesterday I’d come across that dream I’d written up a year or so ago when I was looking for the description of that other dream, and realized that both dreams had images of paints and drawings and charcoals and pastels and thought how interesting, how wonderful, the subconscious drive in this direction, the apparently irresistible movement towards drawing and painting, given the growing pile of play things on my bedroom floor…
…and for the 2 hours that I can’t find any sign of old photos or negatives I wonder also if I took any pictures of the drawings and paintings I used to do, but when I finally find the box, Oh, look, there’s a couple of old sketches at least –
and I think, gee, I used to be able to draw, so hopefully it’s kind of like riding a bicycle and the memory of How To is still somewhere there in my fingers, or tucked away in some room in my brain, or buried deep in some level of viscera.
And in a fit of gleeful determination to take on yet more and more, to open up the doors wider and wider to what might be possible or might possibly get done, I sign up, I commit to write one paragraph a day for 30 days.
Here on the blog.
Just one paragraph.
A day.

Fresh – the rain that breaks the heat wave

July 19, 2013March 22, 2014 Katharine Asals27 Comments

The week has been an insufferable heat wave – impossible to think of anything else unless living in a bubble of constant air conditioning (which I do not).
For days a thunderstorm was threatened, promised.
I hoped for it, prayed for it, sweating away the nights on the couch, unable to sleep.
Finally today it arrived.
The clouds announced trouble coming.
Winds blew furniture and branches everywhere.
The tree in the backyard split in two, crashing into the neighbour’s back yard.
The cat huddled under the bed as lightning lit up the dark sky and thunder crashed around us.
I felt like Dorothy, looking out the windows, watching, waiting.

But in half an hour it was all over, the rain stopped, the clouds passed on by and the sun even came out, no longer a searing enemy, but just gently lighting the wet plants, the cool sidewalks, the last moments of the day…

Weekly Photo Challenge – Fresh

Nostalgic evening

July 5, 2013March 2, 2015 Katharine Asals24 Comments

A long walk home from work after some 12 hours in front of the computer and it’s a hot heavy summer night and the downtown is busy and congested with crowds and throngs of people all moving in different directions at different speeds.
In a square with a fountain, kids play in and out of the water, drenching themselves fully dressed in that way kids will do without a thought, without a care, letting themselves go, free and open into the sensation of it all, the wet, the surprise of it, the cooling down of the body. One boy rides a scooter between the shoots of water. I suddenly long for freedom and energy and optimism of childhood, for the hot summer nights when I’d play loose-limbed and happy with my friends with just this kind of abandon.
Rounding a corner I happen upon an old payphone – a relic from the past so hard to come by these days, the graffiti and garbage collecting on and around it suggesting a sad and lonely disuse, the discarding of quaint technologies, already forgotten.
Heading up Spadina the crowds thin out and the colours of Chinatown remind me of other years lived in other cities and other apartments, that one on the edge of Chinatown in Montreal, and the boyfriend I had at the time, and the first night we hung out and he walked along the ledge of a garden, balancing, showing off, both of us giddy with the newness of something, something we didn’t yet know would be so mismatched and dismal.
So much colour and small works of art there is everywhere on this route! A parking lot with a string of bare lightbulbs hanging in front reminds me of quinceañera parties in Mexico with strings of lights and little fold up chairs and tables with table cloths where everybody sits between drinking and dancing late into the night.
How many little glimpses of lives we can have within one lifetime…

Weekly Photo Challenge: Nostalgic