In situ …

I moved into the house at Jokers Hill a couple of days ago (Monday), and I’m feeling pretty settled. Although I’ve forgotten things—my binoculars and bird books, the butter…  But since I’ll be going back and forth to the city I can gather them up. I’m making a list. Add Kleenex after the butter, also my house shoes. I’m crediting the Jokers effect for my forgetfulness. His presence is pervasive, reminding me, as Heraclitus noted, that it’s important to expect the unexpected ... like this sign I’ve never noticed at the front entrance.

The house has no internet connection, and—a positive unexpected—I’m surprised at how little I miss it. I can walk about five minutes to the Research Barn when I need the internet, and I hope not to need it more than once a day. What the house does have is two wonderful working surfaces—a long and solid desk in the office and a large pine table in the dining room. I’ve already made use of both of them.

After I unloaded my goods and chattels on Monday I went for a walk. It was mid-afternoon, overcast, chilly. Snow lay thinly here and there. The water in the pond beside the driveway had congealed but not quite frozen, its surface gelid and unreflective except for one small patch of open water still mirroring the surrounding trees.

I walked the driveway leading to the 19^th Sideroad. It dips and curves and the land around it rises and falls more steeply and more often than the land beyond the Research Barn. The trees are bare and dark, the fields a mix of gold and straw, as if Rapunzel had managed only half her work.

                       

Many trees beside the road have broken branches. I was contemplating that brokenness when I heard an unusual bird call, a kind of trill, followed by nothing. Then it was repeated. A sudden motion and a flapping noise at the base of a tree—a  hawk, richly brown, was on the ground, one wing extended, its bill wide. Both startled we stared at each other. I snapped a picture that’s not very clear though you can see the wing.

Wondering if the hawk was injured or trapped I stepped forward and it seemed to roll sideways. Suddenly there were two large birds, the hawk, and an owl, grey and slightly smaller. The hawk flew, its red tail flaring, swooping across the fields and uttering its alarm call, to land in a row of trees some way off. It kept up its cry at intervals for a long time.

The owl--I think it was a barred owl--flew up into the tree beside me and perched for several minutes. Then it took off, short tail fanning wide, towards thicker woods and in the opposite direction to the hawk.

I went on with my walk, thinking what a wonderful encounter for my first day in the house. 

Stillness

I’ve been thinking about the silence in the house at Jokers Hill, and the stillness I experienced walking there that late afternoon—how it settled me and stopped my mind’s usual restless roving. I was stilled—and refreshed—free for a while to ignore the list of tasks that seem some weeks to be all that a life is. Then it’s as if my life has become an endless to-do list … If that’s the case, it’s time I made a to-do about it. Or maybe it even calls for a tantrum, it’s no way to live. What is all the busyness that marks our lives now, that makes us on the one hand feel so important and on the other leaches away energy and delight? Some mis-sense of time rules us.

On Wednesday morning last week I went down to Harbourfront and The Power Plant to spend another hour at “The Clock,” Christian Marclay’s mesmerizing movie collage of scenes from films that show a clock or a watch, moving minute by minute throughout the 24 hours that make up a day*—and that match the precise time at which one is watching. I’m not sure why it’s so compelling.

Well, there are several reasons, I suppose—film is itself compelling; there’s the extra little frisson that comes when you recognize a scene and know the movie it comes from; watching for the clocks takes you out of yourself away from the regular course of your day; and then there’s the way in which the mind (my mind, anyway) tries and tries to make a continuous narrative out of the disparate scenes unfolding one after another. I found myself thinking about Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter Night a Traveller, a book I love for its simultaneous invoking and refusal of stories, its stance against conclusion.

My hour there was neither silent nor still, but it did let me forget my preoccupations, and was refreshing. Though not as refreshing as the 20 minutes or so when I stood by the lake watching and listening to a small flock of long-tailed ducks. There was no wind. The morning fog had thinned but was still present enough to make Toronto Island a blurred grey line in the distance, a darker grey than the sky and the water surrounding it.

                                    

 The ducks were feeding, diving and surfacing on either side of a dock, and calling. They utter a lovely muted call—it’s described as a yodel in the bird books but is softer, to my ear (and I like yodeling) more musical. I stood just listening. 

Then they were close enough for me to photograph, and to watch them diving.

                                    

One went under quite near me and I was startled and delighted when I then saw it swimming underwater, its movements and the pattern of its plumage quite visible. I hadn’t thought the water in Toronto Harbour would be that clear.  At home I was startled again when I discovered a trace of that underwater image in one of my photographs. You can just see it surfacing in the lower right corner of the photo below.

                                    

When long-tails dive the movement is both sudden and smooth, elegant. I wanted to capture that moment but missed it every time—though once I got the splash, that little turmoil it left behind as it went under.

I keep going back to those few moments of watching and listening and my own stillness in them, thinking I want more of that in my life.  

On second thought, maybe I also want that little turmoil (the image or idea that comes suddenly) with the smooth stillness of the lake stretching out around it (the space to linger with it, let it grow).

*Here's a link to a New Yorker essay on Marclay's work: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/03/12/120312fa_fact_zalewski 

The Adventure Begins

The house at KSR is ready! We drove up yesterday afternoon with two cartons of books, a couple of bags of papers, and the files I want on hand. Mid-afternoon on Friday isn’t the best time to head north on Dufferin—we were slowed by a stop light out of commission and then an accident. It was 4:00 and the sun low by the time we arrived.

It didn’t take long to unpack the books onto a shelf in the office. There’s space there for a lot more, which can’t be said of my shelves at home, where books are stacked in front of as well as on the shelves. I’m not sure more space is a good thing. I’m looking forward to having less at hand, perhaps to having less in general. On the other hand, perhaps that space offers itself for thinking in—room to let my mind wander and see what it might find. I’m looking forward to settling in the study, with its fine windows. 

And it’s exciting to see my books on the shelf, inviting me to pick them up.

Over a cup of tea we sat and listened to the quiet—no wind, no traffic, no voices. I haven’t felt that kind of silence in a long time. Though the afternoon was darkening we went for a walk. Twilight thickened, the air was still and chill. Occasionally we heard chickadees, but saw none. No one else seemed to be around.

The trees are bare now, except for the willows, which still have a yellow-green tint to them, a softness that feels like foliage. But the land has changed. Green is still brilliant in the undergrowth, but it’s a minor note. Neutral colours, the faded beiges of seed heads, the pale grasses, and the browns—dark, reddish, pale—predominate. Here and there a note of brilliant white: milkweed pods exploding with seed that haven’t yet sailed off. But it’s the textures that strike me, stark lines of branches and trunks of trees and then fields where the plants are leaning or drooped over and somehow without clear edges.

The sky had grown colourless, except for a small flush of pale pink. We walked past a large oak whose branches still held scattered leaves and made a lovely shape against that pale sky. In the ponds the reflected trees seemed clearer than the actual ones. The forest and slopes beyond felt slightly blurred. The air was getting colder, the light less, and so we turned back and came home.

Now I’m busy making lists of what I think I’ll need. I hope to gather things together this coming week and be in residence there before the month is out. 

Field Notes at last ...

Below are the notes I made when we drove to Jokers Hill nearly two weeks ago now, so I could take a look inside the house and start planning what I need to take with me when I finally move in. I'm posting them here as a sample ... and ideally they get written up into full sentences that pull other details in their wake. Of course for that to happen they have to be written up within living memory of being recorded ... a shorter and shorter period of time I find.

In this case, I didn't get beyond the notes -- but if I had expanded them a week or so ago I would certainly have noted that the pond where I saw the geese is a farm pond -- and that many years ago now, as many as twenty, late one fall we saw several hundred geese gathered on the property, readying for migration.

November 4, 2012 – To Jokers Hill, overcast

Hawk in flight north of Yorkdale Station

Another on a lamp pole just beyond

Gulls

Xpanding housing …

Just north of side road 18: dozen geese by a pond

At the house – lock stiff

Good windows I can look out

Study faces north, back stares into the open woods

LARGE tree – what is it?

Forest floor leaf-covered, brown

Kitchen well equipped, better pots than home

Back deck with barbecue

Fireplace!

Dusty miller still healthy in the front border

Can I have a bird feeder?

Geese still there on the way home

trees bare, cornfields faded – cornstalks with leaves pointing  (in the direction of the prevailing winds?)

haggard  look

beside the Allan, in the city: ragweed both seeded and still blooming – Michaelmas daisies blooming too, purple and gold the colours of the season