Places in the heart

It's a season for memories. Almost 25 years ago this month, we began living part-time at an old cabin in a beautiful coastal valley north of Squamish. That's how we described our situation -- "we live there part-time" -- because it was so much a part of what we lived for, so much where we preferred to be, if earning a living in Vancouver hadn't been the bigger and necessary part of the equation.

For almost 15 years, we were there virtually every weekend, every vacation, all year around. The cabin itself was old, but habitable enough (it's mouldered into the ground now), with windows looking south onto our big lawn and gardens -- JT's vegetables and my flowers. If the spring had been wet, as it has been this year, our June task would be to tame the respective jungles.

It was hard work and pure joy -- the happiest years of our marriage.

Our cats snuggled down in their travelling box and slept most of the way back and forth. When we hit the rural road and stopped at our gate (20 feet behind me to the right, in the top photo), they'd begin to purr. Like us...but with leashes....they spent all their days outside there, weather permitting. When I wasn't gardening or gathering wood, I was doing art. When I turned 50, I vowed to follow an art book exercise to "draw on a roll of paper every day for a year, and at the end of the year, unfurl your roll of drawings."

And I filled sketchbook after sketchbook with scenes of the forest, wild plants, Cloudburst Mountain to the north (which gave our getaway its name, "Cloudburst"), sometimes a deer family, the wild and cultivated flowers, and the endlessly fascinating scene from our front window -- tree shadows and silhouettes on the bright front yard, with "The Studio" (an old horse stable where I briefly experimented with sculpture) almost hidden in the deep shade of the woods between our clearing and the road.

 

One June, I made a pastel drawing of the dramatic shadows of early morning, just as the sun rose above the high treetops to the east and raked across the front yard.

This drawing had its flaws but it hung in my old Vancouver studio and came with me in 2012 to the new studio in The Yellow House. This June, when I realized I'd accidentally smeared it with the edge of one of my makeshift work tables, I decided it was time to turn it into a painting.

I decided to work over my earliest painting from London, Ontario days, which is firmly embedded in a JT-made frame. I taped the inner edges of the frame to protect the wood and set to work.

I wanted to work loosely, but with my first lay-in I realized I hadn't placed the shapes correctly.

I washed over the whole thing with yellow-green and began again. Many times, it was an emotional experience -- the memories surfacing as the painting became more distinct.

The painting is finished and sits against a bookshelf now, handily in its own frame -- "June Morning at Cloudburst."   You can see its development here.

I have several friends who live their own version of this double life -- travelling back and forth between the city and their special place, their "real home," for however many days of the week it is. These places in the heart become deeply imprinted.

Even now, eight years since we last rode up to Cloudburst, I can look out the window here in Vancouver, at any season of the year, in any kind of weather, and make the memory-based adjustments that will tell me exactly what it's like now in that valley, along that road, on that magical piece of land that's now given up to ferns and thimbleberries and fallen trees. In my garden here in Vancouver, the Black-Eyed Susan is blooming now -- a descendant of the original 3" plant we bought in our first summer at Cloudburst. There are good memories.