Shell.

I am stone, they tell me. I am weather washed, beaten by harsh waters, eyes shut tight at the crash coming down. Flinching permanently, closed like a tomb, my soul shows no outside signs of life. No wisps of joy escape my sealed countenance, my eyes harden unintentionally. What I experience as fearful non-stepping on toes, they only know as my winter silence. I am ice carved, non-melting, living at the poles. Could I but carry a conversation I would surely melt and soak into the carpet, or find I am only crumbling river-slate, soft and nervous.

Not a mask.

How can you say what you're feeling when they're pouring through you so quickly, when you are a sieve? And when the sieve has a hole, and the soft solid fandangled feelings that you were supposed to save are washing down the panel that is your face - slow strawberry sludge settling between the lines of your eye creases, and around the corners of your nose. So obvious, like a grease stain on your clean white shirt, so glaring, so messy, so apparent. How can you say what you're feeling when you're wearing them.

The Laugh. Part Four.

She remembers how it fizzled out slowly, like a can of pop left open in the sun. It was simultaneous with her quitting smoking, the time she quit for good, when she stopped wanting it. After thirteen years. At the very beginning, he had been an exciting shot to the head, but soon became an expensive habit, and what was she paying for this habit? She had the sense of life being dulled, things had become tasteless, numbed. Could she blame it all on a person? Was it all his fault? No. But, at the same time, she knew asking him to leave would be one of the bravest, most important things she could do.

So, it had been four years now, and she felt like a huge goldfish loose in a tiny, backyard pond. There was no one to meet in this little city, in this corner she had chosen. Some afternoons at the restaurant, she would stand by the window and take a big breath, like a smoker, but without the cough to follow. She'd look out across sleepy main street, at the cars parked on angles in front of shops, at the two lone teenagers on the street, skipping school, hand in hand.

The laughing young man had disappeared. She remembered him in a romantic way, but it wasn't that she had been attracted to him. It was more the kind of romance in a children's fairytale, the unreal, glittery kind. Maybe she had dreamed it. Still, she was affected by him - it seemed like yesterday when they met, but she knew it had been months. Three months. Canadian summer was in full bloom now, the huge trees on the streets were green and full. And she couldn't keep down the buzzing in her mind.

Plaster Memories.

I want to write about the light in the room today, how it is a dusty, soft, white light coming through the faded, paper-thin 1960's curtains. My gramma made these curtains, and they used to hang in my mom's room when she was a teenager. We had them in our house growing up, too. In one place we lived, they were hanging in the spare bedroom where my sister slept when she was delirious with pneumonia. She always remembers seeing dad's face in the floral pattern of the curtains, and can't stand to look at the curtains now because they remind her of being so sick. That brain memory happens sometimes, like the way I would see the little worm wearing a hat on the paneled ceilings of different trailers we lived in. Always, I could lay down, look up, and see that friendly little worm.

The house my husband and I are in now has old lath and plaster walls, covered in a texture, too much texture. When we were using the bedroom off the kitchen, my husband slept next to the wall and once found the shape of a boot, right in his line of vision. From then on, his eyes always fell on the boot. He would sometimes mutter about how he couldn't stop staring at the boot.

Our ceilings and a wall are being re-done right now, because of water damage due to ice-dams this winter. As I type, there is a contractor taping and mudding in my kitchen below me. When they took down the ceilings, they found tons of old empty players cigarette packages. Who put those there, and why? I often wonder about the other people who spent the past eighty years in this house. Who were they? I always felt like we kind of rescued this house, as it was in disrepair when we first got it. So many layers of paint cover everything. I get curious when the paint chips to reveal dark, hardwood original baseboards or five panel doors.

For some reason I like to keep as many traces of the original house around as possible. It's like with the curtains, I wish they wouldn't fade, I wish the sun wouldn't do what it always does. I wonder if whoever lived in this house in 1942 could walk through now, and still find their way around, still recognize pieces of the house that their brain has committed to memory. In reality, without continued work, houses fall apart, and when we move on, who knows what will come of this one. The curtains are pretty much useless at keeping light out now, and they don't match my bedding, so I am planning on sewing some new ones soon. These material things come and go. Rust and moths. I can't latch onto them.

On Beekeeping...

Beekeeping takes up all of the senses. It starts on the drive out to the hives - windows rolled down, the sweet scent of beeswax filling up the car. At the hives, your ears are filled with the simultaneous quiet and buzz. Your nose is alert to all the smells – sometimes the scent of the wax is really strong, and you’re always smelling to make sure things are right. There’s also the burning of twigs and burlap in the smoker, which sometimes you accidentally inhale and it chokes you up like you took a big drag of your first cigarette. Then there’s the rush of having thousands of bees humming and buzzing in the hive, flying up and out, and crawling on you.

There’s always lifting involved, too, and honey’s heavy. If it’s hot, lifting a box off the hive can put me into a terrible sweat, and I’m standing there, bees getting louder, and time shortening. My dad, who has been known to wear a veil but forget to close it and therefore get stung on the neck or the face, has taught me to work through the panic I feel sometimes, and basically trust the bees. Last season I was only stung once, at the very beginning of the spring. It’s a wonderful feeling to get through a hive check, or having to do a bunch of cleaning and pulling apart the hives in the spring or something, when the bees are all around you, and to feel calm.

Today's Playlist.

I love to listen to music when I write.

Here's my current playlist:

Anyone's Ghost - The National

This Loneliness - El Perro del Mar

Valerie - Amy Winehouse

Soft Shoulder - Ani Difranco

4th Time Around - Bob Dylan

Let's Break Up - Hayden

Reckoner - Radiohead

Not Fade Away - Buddy Holly

Wild World - Cat Stevens

Sorrow - David Bowie

Bloodbuzz Ohio - The National

Trust in Me - Etta James

Barely Friends - Hayden

Reseraction Fern - Iron & Wine

I Don't Know What I Can Save You From - Kings of Convenience

Twistin Postman - The Marvelettes

Ramblin' on My Mind - Robert Johnson

Travellin' Shoes - Ruth Moody

Come Pick Me Up - Ryan Adams

Size Too Small - Sufjan Stevens

Food.

The fog has been clearing, colours are brightening, and I've been getting back to my creative work. I'm sliding comfortably into some of my previous habits, but I've been opening up new realms in the process, too. After having a brush with cancer, along with other health issues, and making a career decision to pursue further education, it has become clear: music and writing are my lifelines, I must be immersed in them. And not only in the creating part, actually, more in the enjoyment and soaking up part. For, the music and words of others are my food, and only when I am full do I have enough material to spill over into my creating process.

I was reading on this blog that a good rule for writers is to read four times as much as they write. That seems like a lot, but not when I remember my childhood and teen years: I had a book with me wherever I went, and read in the in-between moments, and read myself to sleep every night. It's kind of exciting to think of all the books and authors I haven't read yet, that I will discover. So, I've been getting back into that, and with music, too, getting into new-to-me artists like Robert Johnson, El Perro del Mar, and Edith Piaf, and learning old blues riffs and chord progressions on the guitar.

So, for anyone reading, what are your favourite authors, musicians, films/directors who feed your life, your imagination, and your art?