Due to inevitable circumstances...

Handwritten sign spotted in the window of a small nearby sushi restaurant:

"Due to inevitable circumstances we will no longer be here after August. Thank you for enjoying our sushi these many happy years! We hope to be back some day."

"Inevitable circumstances." The phrase fascinates me as it jingles along in my head, jostling with the more predictable "unavoidable circumstances". In one part of the space-time continuum, I suppose circumstances are "inevitable" -- and rarely "avoidable."

In any case, due to my own inevitable circumstances, this is the first month (I think -- except for when we moved) of many happy years (thanks for that) of To Capture the Eye that I will miss posting an original production of some kind or another.

I've been working away -- sometimes plodding, sometimes grinding...neither a good sign -- trying to finish the Blue and White triptych.  Until this week, it's been very slow going indeed. And the circumstances were inevitable -- inevitable that working on the third panel would present big challenges in making a "seam" with the second panel, matching colours shared between panels #2 and #3, and keeping the whole flow of the triptych going. I thought I'd finish by the end of September but it's not gonna happen.

Still -- inevitable circumstances sometimes have their up-sides. Consider these other recent circumstances.

It was perhaps inevitable that our friendly neighbour Anita would not have two years in a row of a bumper crop of "Anita's squash" -- the mysterious prickly pear-shaped squash that turned out to be something called "chayote" by non-Chinese speakers. Last year her small front yard was packed with an ever-expanding trellis laden with these squash; this year, the trellis is a quarter the size.

The up-side: She remembered how much we enjoyed her bounty last summer and brought us some of her sister's harvest, giving us all another opportunity to enjoy each other's neighbourliness.

Circumstance #2: Our Crow Haven neighbours gave us some cosmos seedlings after I'd raved about the special variegated variety that flanked their walk last summer. Inevitably it seems, the seeds ran true to their original type, and our plants yielded mostly white flowers. The up-side? The white cosmos have become the lovely fresh stars of our late summer garden, and I wouldn't trade them for the once desired pink-and-white variegations.

Circumstance #3: Well, of course, it's inevitable that I'd be unable to do all the garden rearrangement that I'd planned for Summer 2014. The up-side? A great treasure sprang up from the vintage compost that I spread on my work-in-progress garden plot next to the back gate. The compost dated back to the previous owners here, and we've never seen anything like this amazing volunteer, except to recognize that it's one of the Cucurbitaceae (that's for all those who love that funny word "cucurbit" as I do). It has now produced about 40 feet of trailing vines,and dozens of golden yellow trumpet flowers that bloom in twos and threes, each lasting just a day.

AND there are so far nine quirky flat-ended squash/gourds(?) awaiting our pleasure:

(If you can put a name to this, please reply soonest)

And so.......while it's inevitable that I haven't yet completed the B & W triptych, it's gradually coming together and just might exceed all expectations. Would it be an inevitable coincidence...or maybe an enviable coincidence...or certainly an incredible circumstance...if I were to finish it the first week in October, just in time for the birthday milestone of the original Blue & White Girl?

Waiting for Mary Poppins

With September's lengthening shadows, there will soon be a week or so in which our backyard trellis will duplicate itself in Shadowland on the back wall of the building across our laneway. This phenomenon always puts me in mind of Mary Poppins in my very favorite childhood books (and for goodness sakes, she neither looked nor behaved anything like Julie Andrews).

In one book of the series, Mary Poppins Walks Out the Door, the story ends with Mary P putting the Banks children to bed and then walking out of...the door that's reflected in the window of the nursery!  It was a long wait for me till the next Christmas when my aunt, to whom I owe my Mary Poppins enchantment, reliably produced the next in the series, Mary Poppins Comes Back' in which without ceremony, Mary and her trusty umbrella blew back into the Banks' lives on a March wind.

If Mary Poppins someday walks into our back yard through the shadow of the trellis, she'll find herself right at home in The Yellow House. For several reasons, our "new" home invites odd shadows and mystifying reflections that we still exclaim about. For one thing, the small window panes in our front door have bevelled edges, which produce oddities in themselves when viewed from an angle:

 When the sun is low, or the nearby street lamp is lit, the light will enter, reflect off the mirror on our antique wardrobe on the opposite wall, and bounce a multi-faceted reflection back onto the wall the door is set in...quite creepy when we first noticed it.

We had so much less light at our old house, with its smaller windows and abundantly treed street. Here, we have a delightful picture window, with no tall trees opposite, and the light streams in, to the great pleasure of the cats.

Sometimes the sun reflects off objects on our table and give us weird views on the ceiling like this one:

It was truly spooky the day after we'd been reading about the Flying Snakes of Indonesia when this image flew up to our ceiling:

Other mystifying effects result through the combination of the picture window and the placement of our main floor twelve steps above ground level (a not uncommon design feature of the old houses in this Vancouver neighbourhood). Sunlight will bounce off cars parked in the street below, casting weird shadowed reflections as far back as the chimney wall more than halfway into the depth of the house. Our faithful wooden camel and a table lamp starred in this one:

And the amateur photographer stars in this one, as I try to capture the mystery of it all:

The most puzzling and sometimes eerie reflections of all appear in the double-paned glass of the front window -- true Mary Poppins country -- but they're best seen when a single kitchen light shines in the darkness, elusive to the camera.

The Yellow House has its charms, but ...have I said this before?...we miss our old place. The old one had just one fascinating shadow, one we never tired of seeing: one cat or another sitting in a morning window above the staircase landing. For this, I'll borrow the title of Jung's autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections.