1. Midsummer Garden being made in the lot beside Kivela's Bakery. Willow women helping on this project! [WWomeny are just in the process of making their website, but if you are a gardener, check the upcoming horticulturalist workshop).
2. SuperiorFinn Midsummer/Juhannus Art Festival, which will be held Sunday June 22 at the Finnish Labour Temple aka Finlandia Club. This is an art festival and sale with many fantastic artists, including a performance. I will post our call for Painted Chairs, soon! These chairs will line the Bay and Algoma corner and jazz up this area for Midsummer! So dig out an old chair, think of a midsummer garden or Finnish ancestry or history, and set your third eye roving...
3. Women's Shebandowan Retreat. This is a weekend retreat of creativity, spirituality and honoring nature and food. It will be in Sept. We will make a big bonfire. Have a sacred sauna. Paint stones. Mervi and Satu are crafting this with me...
4. I owe you some stories: blueberry time bomb; my nephews' fishing story...
...but I don't have time for any of those today....so, I'm sending you some colour on this snow-dusted day!
nature paints an old dock board lichen yellow. You can find this painting on the dock below:
you will have to search for it. But it's there.
Musti and Tassu sniffing. They are used to my peculiar stops; indeed, they love going for walks with me. I walk fast, even run with them, but also just hang out in some great sniffing spots, looking around. And I always let them off leash when no one else is around. Like here. Cold weather is especially good for finding less people around....
look at this old rusty chain on what's left of a dock. There are many old chains...
even giant hooks lying around here. This is big enough to nab a ship.
some rusty junk and broken glass caught on the edge of an old wooden platform. It looks like someone placed it there so artfully. But no. There is garbage everywhere...
Like, what is this? A large rusty cap almost 2 feet in diameter. What is it? Who knows? something that fell off a boat? that someone threw overboard? some old industrial who-knows-what just left where it fell many moons ago?
old logs materialize as the lake level drops
red rocks. whether from nature or pollution, I don't know, but this part of the shore is not only scattered with old logs that had floated away from log booms of the past, but is also littered with garbage and ....
oily residue. A dead carcass of some animal lay on the sand, submerged in the water close by this oily crap. A gull was sitting on the back of the carcass, pecking away at it. Strangely, it looked like the carcass of a small lamb.
Ok. Enough gruesome detail. Now, to the grackles bobbing in the wind. Have you heard these birds boisterous calls? Once, I heard a raucous sound of rusty squealing outside my back door, that sounded just like my mom's old clothesline did in the winter. In the 70s we lived in Jenny Ketonen's old turquoise painted house on Empress. The same shiny turquoise paint that is found on the shingles lying under the vinyl siding slapped onto the front porch of this old house I live in now. Jenny [pronouned Yen-newh], too, was a Kauhajokilainen. From our village county. Jenny's old house had a back porch with a pyykki luukku (a narrow wooden door to let in and out the clothes line). When my mom hauled the frozen sheets and towels inside in the winter, the clothesline made the rusty squealing sound of a group of grackles. Scientific name: QUIQUI
leaving you with some orange.
The old tin ceiling of Calico's Coffee Shop, which is right beside Hoito on Bay Street. This place used to be Lauri's Hardware Store (he has since died; as a young boy he left Canada with his family to the Soviet Union, during the '30s demonizing of Finnish Canadians as communists and sinful and immoral. About 800 Finns were deported from Canada as 'aliens'. Lauri returned to Port Arthur. One of the lucky ones. Many Finnish Canadians were killed by the Russians. Their mass graves are still there, bearing witness). Before the organic fair trade coffee shop moved in and before Lauri's Hardware this place was also Samaria Restaurant. Mun aiti used to work there. My sister, Katja, and I dropped in on my mom one day, in our "hippie days" ...or should I say, emulating hippies and anything luv generation and California dreaming? My sister had bare feet. I cant' remember if I did. She will remind me after she reads this. She always has memories that I don't, so we fill in the blanks together. Shift around the stories....
My mom died a small death over those bare toes. Most, if not all, the workers in Samaria Restaurant were Finnish Canadian women. They were sure to notice Ritva's daughters' feet. Finnish women have eyes like that. They see everything.
everything you wouldn't want them to see....
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