Category: Photography
44 Images
Taylor Massey Park at Dawn
Glimpses of Fall within Spring
After the storm, spindles of ice turn a length of driftwood into a sparkly comb, and a forsaken branch nearby bears ice down to the stone.
Anchored in a resolute stance between jutting shards of rubble, repeated lashings of water and freezing spells have burdened the wooden frame. However, a thousand gale-driven waves have not been able to shake it from its moorings.
A sculpture carved in adversity at the edge of the lake, it resembles a silent harp resting on its side. With strings ever more shellacked as winter deepens, the harp seems both haunted and haunting, a formerly melodic rib cage benumbed by cycles of fear and grief. And as the storms intensify, layers of icy bulk cling more fiercely to the body: a freeze frame of memory rendered visible.
Come the melts of spring, the icy coat dissolves and bare driftwood testifies to the hardship it has endured — rough exterior sanded, an extremity sheared from its host.
Cracked and forgotten, the harp-shaped branch may be flotsam, but it is not an useless instrument. With her strings missing, she is all the more open to the beyond. She still stands and bathes in sparkles. She still sings.
At the freezing point,
wild west wind and lake spray
mantle the trunk, marzipan on a rich cake.
Thickened ice highlights the outer layer
then darkens to charcoal-purple,
legacy of the long drift from forest
to midnight bonfires on the beach.
As it salves driftwood burns,
ice defines the border of a helmet
whose irregular edges soften the dark wedge,
trace translucent deltas that flow,
river to ocean evolution
from eye of shark’s prow
to fearful mammal below.
As I nestle between lakeside boulders, drifted ice drapes me in a veil. Successive layers of frozen water etch a daguerreotype portrait of arrested lava, once-fluid anger trapped by a season so heavy and cold.
Behind my nape, the thickness of the ice is greater, and swirls of gray-blue shadows entwine in smoky tendrils with hints of ash. From my chin, crystal shards have grown into a beard that flows from the seam where my edges meet the lake’s beach below.
The ghostly poncho that almost completely glazes me has left only an egg-shaped tonsure melted by the sun. In a few weeks, spring’s solar ascent will fully dissolve my obscuring cloak, but for now I am content with the small oval that lies exposed to the elements.
One day soon, an exhausted bird will warm its feet on my crown. Resting after miles of migration, my guest will sit for a spell all hunkered down into its feathers. As it turns its beak towards the water, it will flex its wings to the humming thwack of high winds that scour my quiet skin into forgiving sand.
Ice Meditations
Ice Study: Guild Beach Scarborough
Lake Ontario: Winter Muse
Christmas Tree Stories
My grandmother Mary Raine gave me this Christmas tree when she was 93 years old. She no longer felt like putting it up every year, especially after the deaths of my father Ron and his younger brother Bob, so she passed the tradition to me in 2004, the year my uncle died. At the end of a Christmas haunted by absence, I carefully wrapped the treasured tree in my suitcase for the rigours of its plane journey from Missouri to Ontario.
I hadn’t decorated a Christmas tree since I was a teenager, but Grandma Raine’s gift inspired me to start again. My mother also gave me some decorations that had been in the family since the 1960’s, including cookie dough ornaments I remember from my childhood.
Artifacts like the dignified Wise Man connect me to home, family, and Christmas traditions, for when I rest him against the tree in 2020, I return in memory to a much earlier era. Once upon a time, my father, mother, and brother used to decorate a full-sized tree together while Birthday the cat lay in wait to attack the glass balls on the lower branches. Christmas carols bathed the tree-trimming task in familiar melodies such as the “pa rum pum pum pum” of Dad’s favourite, The Little Drummer Boy.
I’m fond of the cracks in these circular faces that once inhabited the tree of my childhood home. The cracks testify to the survival of countless Christmas seasons, each with its own tales of cat-paw attacks, breakages, and transfers to new storage locales.
The small red wagon has a story, too. Mom bought it for me one December in the 1970’s when we visited Kansas City’s Wornall House Museum to see it decked out in nineteenth-century Christmas décor.
To blend new memories with the old, I supplemented the original ornaments from Kansas City with ones I bought from Ten Thousand Villages, a shop that specializes in handcrafted items ethically traded from India, Bangladesh, Nepal, and many other countries.
Angels, elephants, lions, and moons mingle on the branches with a reindeer, a yak, and a yeti. Together, they honor Toronto’s multiculturalism and integrate the Christian traditions of my childhood with the religious and cultural pluralism that energize today.
In addition to a tree rooted in the present and the past, festive details like colourful textiles that Grandma Raine crafted — place mats and Christmas tree skirts — brighten the living room.
Also, two books that I received as presents in the 1970’s surface with the arrival of Christmastide. The first one is Christmas Stories Round the World, kindly given by my cousin Denise.
The second book, The Night Before Christmas, evokes happy memories of my parents reading the poem on Christmas Eve, just as their parents read it to them as children. The rhymes and folksy illustrations contained in Grandma Raine’s 1974 gift are enjoyed to this day.
Finally, giant postcards that my mother purchased in the 1960’s serve as Christmassy accessories for staircase spindles. I love how they jazz up the stairs and suffuse the atmosphere with psychedelic cheer.
All in all, sharing stories of Grandma Raine’s tree and other yuletide trappings has heightened my gratitude for gifts that gather layers of meaning as time passes. Thank you, dear reader, for indulging this narrative sleigh-ride through topographies of memory and family history. May your celebrations be merry, healthy, and bright!
Unexplained on the wide sidewalk, the door stands upright with the aid of two wooden stands that grip its bottom rail a few scrapes above the absent threshold.
Though the door no longer opens or shuts, the stout pin of one hinge remains, partly encircled by a barrel of the same rusty vintage. Cracked layers of thick white paint on the panels accent the unhinged condition.
Without a hinge to hitch portal to solid frame, access to an interior is lost. For a hinge is the servant to movement. It facilitates welcomes and good-byes. It swings the dancers, defines transitions, provides an exit.
This displaced door reveals the crucial role of hinges, for entrance to beloved places relies on a connecting part so humble that its anatomy is rarely learned: leaf, knuckle, pin, sleeve. Visitors take the obedient swivel of doors for granted, assuming they can handle endless openings, hesitations, closings, and slams.
No longer a barrier between public street and private property, the door’s new context gives passersby the chance to pause and notice its value as an object divorced from human passage. Free from the press of admission and the drama of expulsion, it serves in a different way now.
With its superfluous locks and bolts on display, the unhinged door invites visions of access without traditional keys. For how might humanity evolve if restrictive concepts of ownership become unfastened from their jambs? How might we open ourselves without fear?
At nine o’clock in the morning, serrated leaves by the fence receive the signature of dark steel lines. Dominant chains have eclipsed the delicate veins, and the diamond shapes seem to define the screen of the leaf-surface, imposing rigid patterns on what needs to grow free.
But the fence’s shadow, looping and stamping itself at nine, will be gone by noon, leaving the victorious leaf unchained. After all, it never asked to be cast in a shadow play. Nor did the plant sign a lease with the barricade that straddles its roots. It only desires to rise from the soil in peace.
The tattoo of links is impermanent, for a seemingly solid fence in the morning becomes a shadow of itself as the day wanes. By psychological extension, shifting solar movements can suggest a hopeful metaphor: harmful habits that create barriers to happiness can dissolve like so many shadow-chains. For example, the bruising self-criticism that overshadows confidence and disturbs inner peace may not be the iron-grey shackle of truth we assume.
If distorted thoughts are building a cage one steel rod of fear at a time, consider the power of one question, “Are these thoughts true?” Then take a deep breath and call out chimeras from their hiding places — behind benches of judgment, beneath shaming silences, under tongues that tsk-tsk on the regular — and watch them melt into phantoms with the passage of the sun. Challenge the cruelty that crushes self-love and reject the quelling projections of others. Above all, hold fast to what illuminates, such as visions of leaves that turn fences to trellises, limitless shelters that dapple and shine.
Aging milkweed pods
suggestive of arching spines
crack open their seams,
give Fall those mad fluffy seeds
that hope no longer constrains.
Seasonal Reverie
Sunrise Wade at Bluffer’s Beach
Dad, I’m giving your military sleeping bag to the Anglican Church of Canada. The last time you unrolled this large pocket for sleepy cadets and folded your tall frame into it, Eisenhower was president and your younger brother was still in high school.You were serving in the US Navy, whose officers were training you to become an air traffic controller. From Midway Island, you witnessed atomic testing in the Pacific, received a gooseberry pie in a package, and wrote long letters to your sweetheart.
After returning to civilian life, you kept this olive-green souvenir of your time at Midway’s Naval Air Facility, and following your death in 1995 the bedroll that once padded your barrack’s bunk remained unclaimed. It was stored away in perpetual coil in my Missouri childhood home.
Not long after the 20th century spiraled into the 21st, the sleeping bag was unearthed from the mudroom and given to me. Following its passage from Missouri to Ontario, it continued its dormant, unfurled existence. Out of active service for 61 years, it seemed unlikely to be recruited for a second mission, and if the pandemic had not struck, it might have lain in limbo for another decade or two.
But today your Navy sleeping gear is needed again, recommissioned by the Community Director of a downtown Toronto church. He has requested emergency donations of sleeping bags, water, and shampoo for people who have pitched their tents against the sheltering bricks of the Church of the Holy Trinity.
So, I plucked your bedroll from its dusty cupboard and ran it through the washer and dryer. Then I carefully spun it around itself — a ritual winding before resurrection into relevance — and bundled it into a shopping bag for transport.
On the designated donation day, I arrived fifteen minutes before the doors of Trinity opened. To pass the time, I paced the nearby labyrinth with a loaded dolly that trailed behind like an unsteady pilgrim who carted your sleeping sack, a case of bottled water, hand sanitizer, and a blanket.
Guided by the twists and turns of an ancient pattern, I meditated on the evolving, looping journey of the sleeping bag — from Midway Island to landlocked Midwest, United States to Canada, Cold War to global pandemic, Navy to non-military encampment, father to daughter, car trunk to dolly, labyrinth to arched door.
In the gentle maze of my mind’s center, images related to the transfer of Dad’s military property appear: my father is in the sleeping bag, 21 years old and having just seen the ocean for the first time, and now it is 2020 and a new person is snuggling into the bedding, someone who needs it.
Dad, I see your spirit in the sleeping-bag gift. I remember how you volunteered as a job counselor for a local shelter and as a cancer-hotline listener. I still see you in acts of service and care, the unrolling of a temporary bed, its careful placement in a tent, a shelter during a time of pain. If you could send a message to your brother or sister in sleep, I believe it might go like this:
Take this donation with my blessing and heartfelt prayers for your well-being. May it provide a protective layer between you and the hard ground below as well as the cold air above.
Like you, I have known struggle. I fought a cold war, lived with epilepsy, and battled for my very life, surviving two bouts of cancer before the third one got me. I was vulnerable. I was scared. I often felt alone. But suffering passes. You keep smiling. You keep making jokes.
May this old but sturdy bedroll of mine help you sleep through the night, giving you strength to face the morning. May it contain some of my optimism, fight, and love to match yours. May it not let you down.
Sleep well, dear comrade, and may sanctuary enfold you always.
Be warm. Be well. Be safe.
Be at peace.
Putting bath-bomb enjoyment on hold for six months does not rate highly as an example of noteworthy sacrifice during a pandemic. However, from March to August of this year, it made me sad every time I saw the lovely non-violent bombs (a Christmas present from my sister-in-law) languishing in the bathroom cabinet.
Without access to a spacious lounging bath at home, I usually count on hotel rooms with tubs to provide ideal conditions for foamy immersion in swirls of moisturizing colour. During this unreliable year of ordinary expectations dashed, travel restrictions grounded my bath bombs on the shelf, turning them into symbols of the luxurious freedoms that I had previously indulged in without a thought.
On July 31st, Ontario entered Stage 3 of re-opening from lockdown, and I celebrated by planning a trip within the province, vowing, “I must not take this privilege for granted ever again!” The chosen destination was Bancroft, and I booked a motel for five days near the end of August.
When the day of the road trip arrived, I carefully packed the four bath bombs that had remained inactive for so long. Upon settling into the motel, excursions to Silent Lake Provincial Park, Papineau Lake, Egan Chutes, and downtown Bancroft took place in the days that followed, and evenings were devoted to long soaking sessions in playful combinations of fizzing blues, purples, yellows, and pinks.
On the last day of the holiday, bittersweet satisfaction accompanied the ceremonial dropping of the fourth unexploded bathing-device in the tub (indigo with gold stars) before fully packing up for departure. Never had I appreciated with such fervour the deferred pleasure of travel, motel life, and a return to decadent bathing.