Our view through a dusting of snow
Wishing you and yours the best for the coming year.
Our view through a dusting of snow
Wishing you and yours the best for the coming year.
waves coming in off Rosario
Do you remember what you were doing the day of the 1993 Inaugural Day Storm? I couldn’t exactly but in 1993 we were building our main house on Obstruction Island. “Oh THAT storm!” I said when I looked it up in the year’s journal.
As we move closer to the Winter Solstice, the sun drops as though someone hit a light switch: one minute we are in the sunset’s golden glow; the next – it’s dark! When I first moved to Obstruction Island in late November of 1992, I was still learning how quickly the bright day switched to black night.
Bad Boat on a Good Day
It was a cool November day, bright and sunny. I was off to town and taking Bad Boat. The tide was swinging hard and the current was running fast as I crossed to the county dock on the Orcas side. I came into the dock, making a U to get my starboard fenders against the dock. The current was trying to sweep the boat backwards and under the approach ramp.
In promotional photographs of the islands, the water is flat, resembling the surface of a lake. This illusion has caused problems for the uninitiated. Beneath that calm surface are the currents of an ever-changing river. How many Islanders have chuckled as they watched sailboats with sails filled slowly slipping backwards, tide trumping wind?
Creeping across the bow of what came to be known as “Bad Boat,” I discovered a thin sheet of ice had glazed the fiberglass while I was at a concert on Orcas. Not only was I was alone at the dock, on this November night; there was no one anywhere on the dark island that loomed up from the community dock. It was up to me.
the shop still under construction…’97
December 20, 2009, two days after the fire
The day before a family Christmas-birthdays-solstice party, my husband Jeffrey’s shop caught fire and burned to the ground, taking with it most of his dreams of projects he
Where is my island?
Almost as far west as you can go
and still be part of the lower 48.
Father north than Victoria BC
which is more west
While off to the east,
the mainland pokes up
a distant view,
a world away.
Once upon a time there was a princess who dwelt all alone on a green island floating in a flat blue sea. This was no ordinary princess nor was it an ordinary island. She was old, as princesses go, already having passed her 50th birthday. But she was a princess, nonetheless.
She slept under the stars on a thick cushion of moss. Well, between her and the moss was a foam pad and she slept snug in her princess-blue sleeping bag. That is what you do when you are a princess sleeping under the stars and have passed your 50th birthday.
Composting is a must for a full-time resident of our little island. There is a pack-it-in-pack-it-out necessity if you don’t want to be buried under your garbage. Besides that, the topsoil is thin,acid, and resting on stone or clay. If you are planning to have daffodils under your firs, or anything else you had better start turning your organic wastes to black gold.
Sorry — the photos for this article were mistakenly deleted. I may post them again and so have left the titles to help guide me.