Not enough, not nearly enough

This adorable trailer decoration was a gift from my sister.
I absolutely love it! Thanks, Liz!

I just miss it, that's all.

I miss it and it's barely over – the sleeping bags aren't even dry yet. There are still marshmallows to be toasted, the giant kind. I don't think the big ones are quite as tasty as the regular sized marshmallows. Maybe they're like fish – the smaller ones are always tastier than the lunkers. I think that's true with humans, too, which is why I will never get eaten by a bear in the woods, not when there is flesh more tender than my own. (Come children, let's go for a walk ...)

We've been camping for years, Dave and I, but I don't think I've ever been so melancholy at the end of a camping season as I am now. Where did it go, the time? It seems like we were just packing the trailer for our first trip and now it's over.

People ask me why I go camping so much. Geez, it doesn't seem enough to me.

Not enough laughter shared around a crackling campfire, not enough spectacular scenery.

Not enough four pound bass dancing on the end of a fishing line, not nearly enough strokes of a paddle through quiet water.

It's the adventure I will miss the most, as I bide my time through the next seven months; the feeling of exploring places never been seen before, of being one with nature.

Of hearing wolves howl in the minutes before the sun rises, of unexpectedly coming across a regal moose on a bicycle trail.

I will miss the quick dance of my surprised heart when my footsteps flush out a ruffed grouse from the yellow gold of the autumnal forest.

I'll miss snuggling into my sleeping bag and falling asleep as soon as my head hits the pillow, clear from worries, slow with the honest exhaustion that only comes from a day spent entirely in the sun and wind.

This is why I camp. 

This. 

And this. 

And all of this.

Balsam Lake, May 24 weekend. Putting duct tape to good use.

Balsam Lake, May 24, campfire with the Raneys.

Kiosk, end of May fishing trip amongst the blackflies. 

Kiosk, June. My big, big bass! Worth the blackfly bites!

Algonquin Park, July holidays. Daytripping via canoe.

Algonquin Park, July.

Sam snuggles in for the night, Algonquin Park, July.

Grundy Lake Provincial Park, August.

Cedar Lake, Brent access point to Algonquin Park, Labour Day.

Cedar Lake, Labour Day weekend.

Kiosk fishing trip, Dave and brother Tom, September.

Kiosk fishing trip, Liz's lunker. September.

Kiosk sunrise, September.

Lake of Two Rivers, Algonquin Park, Thanksgiving.

Two Rivers hiking trail lookout, Algonquin, Thanksgiving.

That incredible view. Algonquin, Thanksgiving.

Canadian or American?

Write what you know. Write from your heart. The number one rules for writing, right?

I've always thought so. Everyone has their own voice, their own backyard, which is different than everyone else's. The literary world would sure be a boring place if every author in the world set their stories in New York, as exciting as the Big Apple may be.

Still, there's a real temptation for Canadian authors to set their stories in the U.S.A. Do other writers from other countries feel the same way or is it just us loathsomely not-confident Canucks? The thing is, the American market is HUGE and the Canadian market is tiny. The thing also is, there is a general consensus that Americans are not the least bit interested in reading about Canada, even though Canadians regularly read American books and watch American TV/movies.

Is that true? As a reader, would you automatically reject a book because it is set in Canada?

I am wondering about this because last weekend I attended the North Words Literary Festival in Huntsville, which was inspiring, amazing and downright awesome. One of the speakers was a Canadian literary agent who was asked whether it's better to set books in the States rather than Canada.

Her answer was, "I'm embarrassed to say, but it's much easier to sell a book set in the States." American publishers, she said, are not interested in Canadian locales, and America is where the big money is, publishing-wise.

This really got me thinking.

I have always been a fan and a big supporter of Can-Lit. I believe that Canadians have important stories to tell and there's no reason why we should be writing about other countries when our own is so rich in character, scenery and history. And yet I want to sell my books – so on the one hand, I'm touting Canadian literature; on the other hand I want a big fat publishing contract and movie rights in Hollywood.

It's hypocritical, sure, but there have been success stories. Take The Shipping News, for example. Set in a tiny Newfoundland fishing village, Annie Proulx's wonderful book won a Pulitzer Prize and spawned a successful big budget movie. Not that I am in any way comparing my work to The Shipping News. I'm absolutely not. I'm just saying it can be done.

My writing group friends asked if I would be willing to change the location in my manuscript to a place in the States. Maybe, I said, if it was a deal breaker. But then I got to rereading my novel and realized small town Ontario is more than just a location – it's the very soul of the story and it's what makes the main character who she is. It would be an entirely different story set somewhere else.

Then I thought, well, why not set my next book in the States. So I started scouting the internet for ideas. I thought, well, Maine, Vermont, Pennsylvania, Michigan – they're all close to the Canadian border. Geographically, they're a lot like Canada. But as I narrowed my thinking south of the border, I realized I don't know a thing about local history, dialect, geography, scenery. Nothing. I turned away from the computer with frustration, thinking, "why am I even bothering to think about this? What is wrong with writing about what I know?"

I realize that, if you're a true writer of fiction, you should be able to write about anything, anywhere. After all, it's the characters who matter, not the geography, right? Maybe... I don't know...

So I'm asking you. What do you think? Should we write about the place we call home? Wherever that may be? Or should we write to where the market is, hoping to tap into a bigger economic pie?

The horror of the mower

Cutting grass on a riding lawnmower is the most active thing you can do without doing a thing other than being bobbled around on your lily white butt and steering a go-gart with a mulching, gulping,  photosynthesis-tipped-and-bleeding maw.

A deadly process, that. Especially if you're a toad or a hairy caterpillar, or one of the herd of bifurcating mushrooms growing in our yard.

I was cutting grass yesterday, because I had to do something. What I wanted to do was watch TV but Dave was outside chopping wood, taking the swimming pool down and putting tires on the utility trailer. Every once in a while he'd peek through the window at me happily hunkered down on the chesterfield with a mouth full of Veggie Pizza and the clicker-box in high gear, and he didn't look pleased.

Fine, then. Feck it. I put on my work gloves and went outside to see how I could help my lord and master around the yard.

"Did you want some help splitting kindling?" I asked.

"Sure!" he said, beyond bliss because I had finally come outside.

I split kindling for ages, at least 10 minutes. Needing a break I asked, "Would you like me to cut the grass?"

"Sure," said Dave, with no exclamation point because his bliss was thinning and now he had to stop what he was doing and check the oil in the lawn tractor and add air to the tires. While he did that I went inside, filched a little more Veggie Pizza because I had burned off so many calories with the 10 minutes of woodsplitting, then cruised Facebook, adding a few witticisms that were bound to make the world a better place. When I heard the lawnmower running I sighed my best martyr's sigh and tromped out the door, wearing my best martyr's frown, to trim the family real estate.

The thing I noticed, as I whirred and jiggled across the lawn, which can barely be called a lawn as it is actually a series of weed beds connected by a snaking web of tree roots, is how many mushrooms have popped up since the summer drought abruptly ended with a month of rain. I had, in fact, been admiring two mushrooms that grew side by side next to the driveway. They looked remarkably like golf balls, if looked at from certain angles. From other angles, they reminded me of breasts, especially as their firm round youth gave way to middle-aged spread and started looking all age-spotted, leathery and droopy.

As I made my first few passes around the yard I avoided the mushrooms. I like mushrooms. I don't like eating them, because how can anyone eat anything that has been grown in manure, but I do like their aesthetic, their meaty perkiness in the wild. How many times have you stopped on a hike simply to admire a passing mushroom? Or to pretend to ogle a mushroom while you actually caught your breath and tried to not have a heart attack because of all your couch surfing and Veggie Pizza scarfing?

After a few rounds of the yard, though, it was apparent that I would have to run over the mushrooms if I wanted to do a good job on the grass.

"I'm sorry," I said to the shrooms as I ran them right over.

Their stalky bits shredded like mozzarella at a pizza joint, spewing all over the yard like they were blown out of a cannon.

I squealed something raucous and obnoxious like "Woot!" and did a quick u-turn to go back and see what was left. Most of the mushrooms were now confetti but the top of the biggest mushroom was now upside down. With maniacal glee I ran over it, expecting the top would shred like the rest, only to realize that the tire had merely squished it and now it looked for all the world like a turd from a St. Bernard, run over by a Cadillac.

That's the moment everything changed. Mushroom-killing fever gave new purpose to my lawn-cutting roundey-rounds. I was now a Big Game Hunter, searching for shrooms, slicing, dicing and julienne-frying them, squishing and mashing them. Along the way I also chopped up dog poop, which schmushed into the ground if it was fresh or, if it was dry, spit out of the lawnmower like a cabbage from a Cusinart.

It was all an adventure now, what else could I squelch? Dave had trimmed the dog the other day and I swerved to hit the pile of dog fluff; it blow-gunned out from the bottom of my machinating mower before floating back to the ground, looking remarkably blow-dried. For one horrible moment I wondered if it was the actual dog I had run over, and not just the dog hair. That sobering revelation might have been enough to end the killing spree that my lawnmowing had become, it might have been enough for less evil mortals, but I continued splatting mushrooms and dog poo until the lawn was done.

I climbed off the mower and sat on the front porch to survey my work. From that distance it looked like a lovely lawn, almost golf course-ish in its freshly polished green coat. From that distance you couldn't see the mashed mushrooms; you couldn't hear the screams of the leopard frogs and the hairy caterpillars as they ran for cover; you couldn't smell the olfactory distress that was the scent of newly upturned doggie doo.

Like all nightmares, it's only when you look close that true horror unfolds.

Gah, my house is a bloody mess!

Eating Bugles for breakfast, thinking, "migawd, I have to get my behoven butt on that exercise bike again soon," thinking righteously, yes, must exercise, but first I will jam another fistful of Bugles into my gob and wash it down with coffee.

Not that I can really see the exercise bike. At the moment it's covered with hoodies and fall jackets because there's not enough hangers in the closet and I'm far too lazy to go find some or buy some. And what do hangers cost anyway? Half a week's pay at least? Oh probably. I wouldn't actually know. I see hangers in the store sometimes and think, "who buys hangers?" I certainly don't, though it appears maybe I should. I dunno, hangers just appear at my house. Like they were dropped there by the Hanger Fairy, which sounds gruesome, now that I think about it.  *imagining a large-necked man in a black hood, twirling a plastic hanger in his bloodied hands like a venomous version of Annie Oakley*

You should see my house. It's disgusting. It looks like an episode of Hoarders.

All the extra kitchen chairs are in use as holder-uppers of things-not-currently-needed. Which means crap, quite literally. Holder-uppers of crap. It's all important crap but it's crap in a state of flux. Like, three of the chairs are loaded with stuff-that-goes-back-in-the-trailer. Anybody who has a house trailer and is a mad camping fiend such as myself knows all about that term. Camping season is not all about camping, oh no. It's mostly about hauling the same stuff in and out of the trailer from May through to October. In the spring we gather it all up, wash it and load it into the trailer: food, dishes, sleeping bags, towels, blankets, bug spray and vast vats of Tylenol, and we think, that's it! We've prepared the trailer for another riotous season of outdoor pleasure!

Alas, after our first weekend camping, we have to unload unused food, dirty dishes, smelly sleeping bags, sodden towels and moldy blankets. I wash it all, except the food of course, because I hate it when marshmallows get balled up with used Kleenexes in the washing machine, and then carry it all back to the trailer. This back and forth goes on every time we go camping. Which, as you know, is a lot. There is a veritable path worn between the house and our house trailer. Some days I think we should pave it and paint passing lanes. In the spring we carry out this ridiculous procedure with dough-headed and fresh-faced enthusiasm. At this time of year, not so much. In fact, the stuff that needs to be put back in the trailer has been sitting on the kitchen chairs for so long that I fear it needs to be dusted.

That's not the only thing clogging up our living room at the moment. Another two of our chairs are being used to hold up an area rug, which is drying at the speed of a hibernating tortoise. It was rather gross, the rug was, having been the targeted area of the cats who prefer to spew hairballs and stomach curds onto a soft surface, rather than the much larger and easier to clean hard floors which surround it. It had gotten so bad that Dave and I were sitting on the couch one day sniffing the air and asking each other if we had recently vomited and hadn't mentioned it.

"Did you puke, darling?"

"Not that I remember, dearest. Did you toss your cookies, sweetheart, because it does smell like ralph in here, and not your Uncle Ralph, although he is rather smelly, but not in a vomitrocious kind of way, more like a man who hasn't changed his Depends for a week kind of way."

We do try to clean up the stomach curds as soon as they land on the rug – if we see them land there. The problem lies in us not always being here to see the blessed event and, because our carpet is multi-coloured to hide the dirt, a job it does rather too well, sometimes we don't see the curds until our bare toes find their cooling mushness. Toes are like homing pigeons, aren't they? They have their own GPS systems, unerringly able to find cold cat barf in the dark while blindfolded. I have tried painting my toenails with thick coats of pink polish, ostensibly to block the homing talents of the toes (it's like wearing tinfoil hats to block the secret messages of governments and aliens, which doesn't work – parchment paper is much better for that sort of thing and also prevents your cookies from burning).

The problem with toes as they relate to cat barf is they tend to grind it into the carpet fibres so, after a while, the carpet resembles my son's hair after he has been overly generous with gel. Spiky and stiff ... paints a picture, doesn't it?

So we had been promising to take the rug outside and wash it with lots of strong soap and the garden hose on the first nice day, then hang it on the clothesline to dry. Which we did. Well, bloody hell, we haven't had two nice days in a row since summer ended. And it takes more than one day to dry a rug on a clothesline. It would partially dry, then it would rain and hail, then it would get wet again so finally we dragged it into the house and draped it over the kitchen chairs and now there it sits. Moldering away. Making movement impossible – my butt really is too wide to negotiate a big rug in a small house, not to mention all that stuff-that-needs-to-go-back-in-the-trailer.

The only good news is, with the rug up in the air, the cats can't puke on it. And it does block the view of the exercise bicycle, which means I feel less guilty as I hoover down the Bugles.

Two years

Two years, gone by in a flash and yet doesn't it seem since forever? The magic of that morning. The rarified air. Autumn's rosy red hues looked brighter, music on the radio rang clearer, time whistled along a path that was seemingly paved with magic, rose petals and romance.

Oh, if I had it to do again, I'd do it in a heartbeat, my love. My handsome love.

You have taken worry from my shoulders, you have stood by me in every situation, you are loyal, you are strong, you are honest and true.

And yet you never say my ass looks fat in those jeans.

Happy anniversary, my sweet.