follow your nose

Night Ride

July 23, 2013July 11, 2015 Katharine Asals9 Comments

Biking home late from work, a route different from my usual as I’d stopped to pick up another drawing pad, some conté, a few more colours of paint, and launching off with bags dangling from the handlebars I saw a man I used to know.
Oh, it was a complicated story, an early education in some of the crueler ways of men, the contradictions a man can have, being not at all a good man and yet not quite evil – in other words, definite trouble.
But we are still friends, friends from a distance, so we embrace, each leaning towards the other with bikes balanced underneath, he holding the cell phone aloft momentarily, Dejame saludar, he says to the person on the other end.
To me he says, Call me, Write me, Let’s get together, and I grin and nod, knowing I never will, that I see him now as a symbolic figure in my world who appears out of the blue like a highly personalised superstition. Years ago I nicknamed him Eleggua – trickster, guardian of pathways. When he appears like this, mercurial, on a street corner, it strikes me like a message, an apparition, a reminder to look for crossroads, choices, pathways that may show up leading in different directions.
Pushing off into the evening, I wonder about his appearance, put on alert for what may lie ahead.
Rounding the corner on my bike from College heading up Manning, my attention is caught by a woman’s laugh.
She is a young woman – I see her pulling herself up from where she is leaning over with the force of the laugh at a small table outside Greg’s Ice Cream. And so…, she says, prompting the young man at the table with her to continue with his story, the story that has made her laugh so.
He has a baseball cap sitting smartly on his head, and something about the cap and his very upright eager posture suggests an earnestness, a sincerity, an openness, an undefiled quality.
And I feel their young courtship, such a pure feeling as I imagine it, because of the full-bodied way in which she let herself laugh in the summer night, giving herself over to his story, and because of the way he sits so fastidious and attentive to her. Coming from the chance meeting with the tricky, mercurial Eleggua, I allow their fresh, young, sweet spirits to wash over me in the night, and carry the feeling home with me, wondering what is next on the path.

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…