Images of Autumn

A-maize-ing (Pun Intended)

It's autumn. In some places, it's still summer. Not here, nope, zero, zilch, nada. Officially autumnal. Yellow leaves, crunching, the perpetual smell of burning something in the air, cardis, oxfords, tights, jaunty hats, grasshoppers and wheat and red berries. And NO CAMERA.  Distress.

Right around this time of year, last year, we went to our very first pumpkin festival out in Bon Accord. We've been there several times since (albeit not for pumpkins), mostly because I'm inclined to believe my husband likes a good deal (in any language). They have a corn maze (which I love to tell people is a maize maze, mostly to see the expression on their faces when they don't get it, or think I am suffering from a speech impediment). They also have a canon that they shoot the pumpkins out of at a 2-D pirate ship. (Last weekend, pumpkins not being quite ripe yet, it was a corn canon. Seriously awesome.) I was a few months preggo at last October and not showing at all, yet the demands for 'belly shots' were rampant on Facebook. I was awfully tempted, folks, to stuff one of the pumpkins under my shirt just to freak people out. That, or find a picture of me from Thanksgiving when I've eaten too much and pass it off as baby bulge. Turkey baby. Baby baby. Same difference at four months, right?

So let me tell you about this place. Don't go if you don't have a giant sense of humour, because unless you can get into the kitsch and shabby attractions, you'll spoil your afternoon. The corn maze is awesome-- that is, unless you go at the end of the season, and people have tramped through it to take a shortcut to the parking lot. At that point, you're sort of wishing you'd worn industrial boots because, ladies and gentlemen, a cut cornstalk is actually quite penetrating and resiliant. They also hide a number of oddities, including discarded Timbits, which our schnauzer found (and was disgruntled to relinquish). Their petting zoo boasts an exorbitant variety of chickens. The first time we went they were roaming freely around the grounds. I have a thing for chasing chickens, and every time we've visited since, they've had the chickens behind bars. Alas.

The Enchanted Forest bit of the festival consists of things intended to be creepy... but what makes the Enchanted Forest legitimately creepy is that it looks like a playground out of a horror movie. The statues and whatnot that are intended to be cute and charming have fallen into decay, paint peeling, cement cracking, vines and grasses rising up and twisting around them, like an abandoned circus or playground where children were murdered. WAY freakier than the plastic skeleton sprawled in the dead leaves, although, I must admit that the plastic Kewpie doll in the muddy witch's pot was also somewhat twisted. The kids delight in the mundane plastic skeleton while the adults shiver at the legitimate and more subtle creepiness of the place.There is also an authentic 1970's hearse they pull out for Hallowe'en.

If you have children who have difficulty assessing the severity of a situation, do not take them to the toddler's maze made of six-inch-high bales of hay. I cannot tell you how many kids stand in the maze, unable to figure it out, and believe they are legitimately cut off or separated from their parents, also in the maze.  They stand there bawling until someone comes to rescue them. It never occurs to them that they can walk through or over the wee piles of hay... Strangely, they know that the skeletons in the "concert hall" singing country songs aren't real.

You can stuff your own scarecrow. The best part about this is that people leave behind their discarded scarecrow parts. It's like D-Day on Omaha beach. Lots of parts everywhere. Dismembered scarecrows with their faces drawn on by 6-year-old artists. It's colourful and comical and gruesome all at the same time. Be prepared, friends, if you go, to sit in a hay pile stuffing jeans with straw. 

And did I mention there are pumpkins? LOTS of pumpkins.

We're going back this year because my husband has decided he wants to take pictures of our son on all the pumpkins. We did a dry run of Oliver on the pumpkins and hay bales last week at the Harvest Festival (which really, was just an excuse to shoot corn out of a cannon), got him with an Olympus point and shoot. Epic fail. I have documented a plethora of Oliver expressions suitable for a number of  caption contests... I'm afraid none of the captions would be family friendly. Glare-o-rama. Lots of up-yours stares and eff-you grimaces, proof that kids are on to the ridiculous need of parents to pose them in "fun times" pictures. I can wait until adolescence for those looks, thank you very much.

And then there is the issue of my camera AND lens being in the camera hospital-- still in the waiting room to go through triage, I'm told. Must be a Canadian camera hospital. Luckily, aside from the glaring, Oliver hasn't started doing anything photo-worthy, like sculpting masterpieces or tap dancing. But, the next pumpkin festival is around the corner, and I haven't got a gawsh durn thing to get it with. Le sigh.

In the meantime, please enjoy the collection of foh-tohs I have to share from autumns past. I'm gonna give them their own post so you can enjoy them without the distraction of words. Although, if you're here, thanks for reading the distracting words. I'll also be setting up a new image gallery so if you're looking for some of these fabulous seasonal images, it'll be easier to find them.

The Busy Season

It seems, sometimes, that the months can fly by and feel like days. You look back and wonder where the time went, how you managed to neglect your diary, how your blog goes without updates, and you haven't bothered to answer those e mails from your mom. (I don't have that problem with my mom... I think if I somehow didn't assert my existence in the universe for more than three consecutive days, she'd inundate my phone with messages and eventually end up on my doorstep.) In our world, we moved, took a vacation, and started a new teaching semester all in the same breath. Looking at the calendar, I realise this was more than thirty days ago, not yesterday. It's a miracle some couples manage to find the time to talk, right?



My husband and I found an interesting solution to this problem that inevitably creeps up during the busier phases of our lives. We came across this Q&A book at the bookstore and bought a pair of them. Essentially, there's a different question every day that you answer, everything from philosophical questions (what's standing in your way?) to silly questions (do you need a cold shower?) to questions about what you ate for dinner (what was the last meal someone cooked for you?). The book allows you to record your answers over a period of five years (starting from any year-- you can fill in the year as you go), so in 2012, I can see what I wrote in 2011, or in 2015, I can see what I wrote in 2014, 2013, and 2012. I'm curious to see how my answers this year will be different next year.





My husband I keep them on our night tables, and as we're going to bed, we answer the day's question and talk about our answers. Sometimes we have about thirty seconds of sharing, sometimes the day's question actually gets us talking before we pass out.

A bigger project we've taken on is a sort of auto-biographical journal that prompts you to write down different memories and experiences, info about your family, quirks and quarks, and your philosophy on life... we're hoping to finish them before we're old, senile, and can't remember our own names. We thought it might be a nifty keepsake for our kids or our grandkids, who would never know us as young thirty-somethings, just wrinkly, doddering, doting grandparents. (What I'd really like is for my parents to fill them out, but I don't think that'll happen. They somehow manage to be two of the busiest people I know.) I'll try and find the links for you so you can check it out for yourself. It seems a little daunting, but again, it's been a project that has definitely stimulated some conversation between my hubby and me. It's amazing how much you don't know about someone, even if you've been with them a million years.

The Treatise

So we left off at my sudden and burning desire to photograph the rural and the derelict. I wrote a letter to a friend of mine who, over the last eight years, I have only communicated with via letter. Yep, snail mail, the lost art of writing. My friend, whom I call Joe (the result of another story, which I shall tell another time) is a brilliant young, edgy, award-winning playwright who happens to be Australian and alas, in Australia. We've been exchanging letters since university. In any event, I think I will share the letter I sent to him with you, as it indeed paints our photographic tale of adventure in all the right colours.

I am considering, Joe, writing a treatise on the repelling of mosquitoes, which have effectively stolen what brief summer we have here, that and the incessant road work. Even the immigrants here know the half-joke that ~shire has the following seasons: winter, more winter, still winter, and construction. And this is how we teach them the meaning of the word sardonic.

Conspiracy theorist junkie husband believes that the government… yes, the mighty municipal government… is responsible for the mosquito invasion to distract from the fact that all of ~shire’s major roads have simultaneously been unearthed and are likely to stay that way for yet another summer, thus forcing traffic to constant apocalypse-esque city-evacuation levels of traffic jams. I suppose if hubby and I invested in a kayak, we could use the Saskatchewan River as a sort of shortcut through the city, except I’m afraid that if I got tired, I would be whisked away to Winnipeg, which might be a fate worse than death. 

Winnipeg, you see, used to hold the proud title of Canada’s mosquito capital. They have to regularly spray the city to make it habitable. (I am not sure what effect the spraying of mosquitoes has on the human population, but there must be some sort of chemical reaction in the brains, or else why would people voluntarily stay in Winnipeg during mozzie season?) In the Old Country, they have tales of babies being spirited away by fairies. In Australia, isn’t it the dingoes? Well, here in Canada, it’s mozzies that make off with the infants. I feel like Prime Minister Harper has missed out on a great natural resource, and he is so fond of stripping taking advantage of natural resources. You see, I feel as if Canada has access to a rather brilliant bio weapon. Perhaps that is why we are a peaceable country. No one has the stomach to piss us off for fear of a mosquito bombing. 

I would like to remind you of the tense I used in order to speak of Winnipeg’s mosquito status, its claim to fame: used to, as in, no longer. According to the reports (which remarkably sound like bragging), ~shire presently has six times the number of mosquitoes Winnipeg does. (They have determined this by counting the females. HOW does one DO this, count the females???) I understand that we are a competitive province, one that delights in competition against Winnipeg, but really, ~shire need not be number one in this thing. Being number one in catastrophic environmental destruction and number one in homicides is quite enough. But we are. Six times higher. And they say that this is “average” based on our historical record of mosquitoes, the years before the drought. (There is a historical record of mosquitoes?) Yes, the drought kept the mosquitoes away, but now that the rains have come back, so have the mozzies. In droves. In swarms. In clouds of black, oscillating orgies. They fling themselves at the car as you tear away from the park, bouncing off the windows and the hood, tires screeching, not unlike hapless zombies at the end of the chase scene.  Our walls were covered to them (mosquitoes, not zombies) to such a degree that dear husband lit the mosquito coils inside to smoke them out. I think he was willing to do a dozen loads of laundry to get the campfire smell out of every fabric thing indoors than be eaten alive in our sleep. 

In Newfoundland, at the wildlife museum, there is a rather substantial jar filled with red liquid (which I have told myself to this day is red-dyed maple syrup). The placard tells us that this is how much blood the mosquitoes can and will drain from a moose, ultimately killing it. People are wearing their mosquito bites like battle scars, and really, that’s what they are. People seem determined to tough it out, to go out of doors bundled like ninjas in winter, and run through the parks, arms flailing like madmen, chased by an almost cartoonish cloud of black mosquitoes. 

I myself made the mistake of going out of doors one afternoon sans chemical protection. Husband and I stumbled upon a canola field that played host to a row of derelict barns. I had to shoot it. I hopped the barbed wire fence and traipsed up the long unused dirt path through the trees, camera in hand, floral rain boots on, grass to my knees, butterflies flitting in the weeds and wildflowers, sunlight pouring through the birch and poplar. I felt like I should have been in some rustic Whitman poem and was feeling rather good about myself, trekking through nature to shoot the landscape. I felt very artistic, very idyllic indeed. Until I was swarmed and felt rather less idyllic as I ran, screaming like a banshee, back to the car. I should not have screamed, because I’m certain I swallowed enough mosquitoes in that instant to end the (slight) anemia I’ve suffered since Oliver’s birth—or, perhaps add to it. Is it a myth that the mozzies can bleed you from the inside out? Or does that go in the swallowing of watermelon seeds category of old wives’ tales? 

Well, regardless of the insect protein I ingested, in that moment, I sustained fifty bites from shoulder to elbow on my left arm alone. To add insult to injury, as I was later examining my swollen face in the bathroom mirror, I could not tear my eyes away from the grotesque sight (they say the same thing of horrific car accidents), and smashed my face into the door, squirting a stream of blood from my left nostril all over our Ikea bath carpet and orange Ikea bath towel. Husband o' mine swears I did it in purpose. I’ve wanted to replace that bathmat for months, and I’ve left it there, bloodstain and all, to prove to him that I did not intentionally inflict a nosebleed on myself. He forgets that, graceful as I am, I once gave myself a black eye on the folding closet door, which, by the by, does not make for a sturdy prop when one is trying to wiggle one’s legs into skinny jeans while pregnant. Words to the wise, should you ever try to wiggle into skinny jeans while pregnant.

I wrote an e mail to the mayor. He has ignored my invitation to partake of a walk through the park with schnauzer Stanley some evening. Nor has he decided to fix the plane that, once upon a time, before the time of the decade-long drought, sprayed our fair city with mozzie-killing pesticide.

But I have also considered the alternative (the alternative to what? To becoming a shut-in). Would repelling the mosquitoes through natural means make summer in ~shire any more tolerable? Here is, in no particular order, the list of ways one can naturally repel mosquitoes. I shall leave the inevitable conclusion to you.

The List

• ·         Wear bright colours, such as traffic cone orange and day-glo yellow
• ·         Duct tape your pant legs and your long-sleeved shirts down, even in 35C heat waves
• ·         Wear many loose layers, even in 35C heat waves
• ·         Refrain from perspiring 
• ·         Avoid activities that involve CO2, such as exhaling
• ·         Eat lots of raw garlic or ingest garlic tablets so that your skin secretes a garlicky odor
• ·         Douse yourself in citronella, geranium, and soybean oil
• ·         Rub yourself with fennel, thyme, clove oil, and celery extract
• ·         Bake at 350 for 25 minutes
• ·         Refrain from using shampoos and soaps, particularly ones with a floral scent or ones that eliminate your own scent
• ·         Do not mask your natural body odors
• ·         Slather your body with bear fat/grease that has been infused with castor oil or cloves or cedar
• ·         Spritz yourself with the urine or musk of bears, deer, or other various animals. If deer or bear are unavailable, cow urine and cow dung are effective alternatives
• ·         Smoke, or burn something indoors when you are not at home
• ·         Do not wear sunscreen

Old and Dusty

While at the farmer's market, I met a photographer who has an eye for the kind of things I'd like to shoot... that is, if I could just pip off to <insert exotic country here> whenever I felt like it. In fact, she is in Borneo at the moment on a photo shoot. I sigh in green, frothy jealousy. But it was not her exotic shots that caught my eye but her local ones.

Yes, she had a rather impressive, textural and rich collection of the rural and the derelict. I have no idea where she found the house? barn? that she shot in, but I want to find one like it, too.

When I was a child growing up in Newfoundland, just up the highway from my grandparents' cabin in Holyrood, there was an abandoned house. Salt box house, in retrospect, and it still had all the fixings-- old furniture, old stove, the kind you have to put wood inside to get hot... at least, that's what I could glean from peeking in the window and the open door. My father would never let us go inside. He went inside once and left me outside, just burning up. I never wanted to disobey him more in my life than at that moment. I never wanted to explore a place more than this old, abandoned property with the clover and the thistle and the grass growing as high as my waist, the pieces of somebody's life left behind, perhaps the magazine left on the table where someone had been flipping through it, dishes left in the sink to dry, never put away, moldy linens still in the closet and on the iron beds...



I was experiencing my first pang of nostalgic curiosity, a haunting feeling I experience whenever I saw a place like this, or watch Titanic or Schindler's List, or hold an artifact from a museum (you're allowed to do that, right? touch the old stuff?), put my grandmother's dainty gloves on my own hand or go through her purse and find a 80-year-old shopping list. It's the feeling I had when walking through the halls of Versailles and marveled that once upon a time, it too was a house and not a museum, that people looked out those windows on their drive and on their yard, or sat in those chairs, now forbidden, and stoked the now empty fireplaces. The idea of ghosts was fascinating to me, romantic, that the shades of the past could still be creeping about. I was never afraid of ghosts, just the dark Shadow Man I was convinced lurked outside my bedroom door in the hallway. But he was not a ghost.



So the photograph I saw that really captured my attention was one of a bouncy horse, a toy that I'd had as a child. It sat in the ruins of whatever place she was photographing, this symbol of innocence and childhood just cast aside. Why was it left there among the bottles and the cans and the other remnants of desertion?

I've been trying to convince my husband to take me on an excursion into the deep, red-neck countryside of this province so I can trespass or creep into the derelict and abandoned barns along the way... The best he's done so far is take me a 20-minute jaunt to the outskirts of town, where our adventure will continue next time.

Until then, I highly encourage you to visit her site and to take a look through the galleries. You may wonder why I am promoting another photographer's site, that it will hurt my own business, but to summarize one of Ayn Rand's philosophies rather crudely, we should not be afraid of others' greatness or attempt to squash it. It is a small person who fears the accomplishments of others. We do not fail because others are successful. We fail because we ourselves have not achieved success or greatness. So, waxing philosophical aside, check out her galleries. They're great. And visit mine while you're at it.