Photos – Page 11 – follow your nose

Natural Friends

June 6, 2017June 6, 2017 Katharine Asals7 Comments

Work has been more than a little intense lately – a good thing, of course – but the rare free moments are spent with friends or scribbling at the studio or, as spring springs and the weather gets nice, seeking to carve out wee moments that allow a few breaths of connection with nature.
In the mornings, if I hover at home for long enough, I can hear the coo of the turtle doves – maybe my most favourite sound ever – their gentle melancholy coos so delicious I just can’t rush myself out to the bus and begin the descent into the city, moving through the increasing urbanization into downtown, the sea of condo-building cranes and growing gridlock, to sit perched alone in a room with a computer.
If I opt to bike or walk a ways before hitching up with some form of public transit, there’s the kind of long short cut through the park.
And well, look who’s here – the rough croaks from the ponds and puddles all along the flooded walkway freeze time and I squat to take a closer look. Who cares if I’m late? I mean really – let’s talk priorities. There is a rarely seen friend here, the moment suddently so exquisite, it’s impossible to rush.

All the times with frogs come back to me – the streams filled with tadpoles when we were kids, the rims of ponds and lakes, long slippery legs swimming amongst the lilypads…

One of the jobs that’s had me busy is with one of my most beloved friends, Nicky – making a film of the play she did – a kind of hybrid of documentary meets play on film. Oh, her breathtaking performance – gives me goosebumps still after so many viewings. But the lines also follow me through the city, their poetry –

Love is love, and hard enough to find.

Oh indeed. It comes how it comes.
So when the cat, the center of our little home universe, gets diagnosed with something that will cost an extra $60 / month in medication for the rest of her life and griping about it to Nicky in the afternoon at her kitchen table she shrugs in a way to suggest maybe it’s time to rethink…
Oh but no.

Love is love, and hard enough to find.

Heading home at the end of the day, I’ve a bit of a long, elaborate route involving 3 buses, all to be able to watch the evening skies and shifting neighbourhoods and avoid the bad air and dank dark underground of the subways.
The streetcars on Queen have been replaced with buses and by about Carlaw at 8:30 or 9 on a Friday, heading east from the studio after work it occurs to me, Hey, I wonder if I should text Tom & Bea…? Cause they live somewhere along the route here in the east end and it’s Friday…
Tom & Bea arrived in my life in the strangest way – when my husband arrived from Cuba, the 2nd day he was in the country we went down to Harbourfront to catch a free concert with Femi Kuti.
Like, just soak that in for a moment – a free concert with Femi Kuti –

Sometimes Canada just rocks.
Anyways there we were, milling around in the crowds in the beer tent, my husband fresh off the plane from Cuba, and a woman stops and says to him: Hey! I know you!
That was Bea. With her husband Tom. They’d been tourists in Cuba, and well, whadyaknow, small world.
Right away there was something so familiar about them – Tom lanky with a sideways smile and a glass of beer, Bea vibrant and beautiful and laughing and always moving – there was almost a kind of deja vu, like I KNOW these people.
Several years and a divorce later here I am on the Queen St bus wondering if I should drop Tom & Bea a line.
Even just saying their names makes me happy, makes me think of the kids books, Ant & Bee –

But no, no, it’s late already, too late to be starting evening plans.
Until the bus passes the patio of that Cottage joint on the south side just after Leslie, and I glance over and could swear that’s Tom stretching to make a point to the fellow beside him at a table right there in the middle in the thick of things.
Without thinking, I scramble to jump off the bus.
What’s the worst that could happen? Maybe it’s not them?
I can always catch the next bus.
Totally worth the risk…

Love is love and hard enough to find.

Weekly Photo Challenge – Friend

Details of the Squash Takeover

July 17, 2016July 17, 2016 Katharine Asals17 Comments

Mornings on the patio…
Last year, in the borders out here on the patio, I planted a few tomatoes, some peppers, perennials.
This year, not so much, but our new-ish neighbour to the left, after a few tentative tomatoes last year, suddenly decided to go all in.
She has a much larger section of dirt and less patio, so rows were created in the earth, sections for various kinds of tomatoes, beans, herbs, squash, and the tall corn…
For weeks she’s been out there watering her plants every morning, though when you ask her there is a shrug of doubt – she’s an urban girl from Nigeria, she tells me, and her friends back home tease her that she’s come to Canada to become a farmer.
It’s all so new, she says, she herself doesn’t believe the plants will grow.

June and so far July have been full of long dry sunny days.
Mornings have the rustle of people in pyjamas out watering and tending the flowers, the vegetables – weeks ago the grass dwindled to a shrivelled pale yellow.
But then after so many dry hot days, for a glorious 24 hours it rains…

And the next day I am out again in the morning sun, and am a bit confused at the huge leaves over on the left.
A massive plant has started growing through the fence from my neighbour’s side…

It has already crowded out the little instalments of parsley and coriander I had growing over in that corner.

She comes around to see it – she can’t believe it!
That her gardening has been so successful the plants are bursting through the fence, seeking out more space to blossom and flourish!

I lift up a leaf to show her one squash that’s already an astonishing size.
Her eyes widen – the miracle of it!
She tells me I must use not only what is growing on my side, but help myself to her side as well, as she has more vegetables than she knows what to do with. That I must show her how I cook it, as she doesn’t even know anything about this kind of squash.

So, practicing my recipes, this morning for breakfast, I had flor de calabaza with salsa verde… yummmm…

Weekly Photo Challenge – Details

Looking back

July 12, 2016January 4, 2017 Katharine Asals13 Comments

I was in Ottawa visiting friends from back in the day, back in Montreal, and as if out of some random pocket of a time warp, my friend pulled out some tiny forgotten paintings I’d done on tiles – tiny still lives of the charming funky place we lived in together so many years ago…

And my gosh, it was a revelation to me – most of all, that I had more or less managed with, more or less made my way around oil paints a couple of decades ago.
I’ve been struggling with oil paints the last few months – torn between the more recent experience of a fast drying acrylic paint, the possibility of fast endless layers, and the faint memory of a rich buttery wet wet paint I was able to negotiate to some degree some decades ago…

Now, trapped in work deadlines, I am fetishizing the time ahead in the studio…how glorious it is sure to be with this new-found half-remembered confidence…