works of wanderlust

Tag: wordy wednesday

  • Crispy Campfire

    As much as I’ve been spending time fine-tuning my campfire cooking skills, I’ve been thinking about all the small ways that effort has translated into a bit of backyard humour, too.

    Having a teenage daughter helps. She often and candidly points out all my shortcomings. Free of charge. “I’m embarrassed for you, dad.”

    Or more recently, “The ribs are burnt, dad. I can’t eat this.”

    They we’re not burnt. They were crispy.

    So it goes that in episode two of Gaige and Crick I tried to do what I always do when I write up a script for a new comic: take a dash of real life and salt it heavily with a bit of exaggeration.

    Perhaps you too have spent some time cooking over a hot flame recently. Watching the professionals barbecue juicy meats over sizzling coals looks like knowledge that should be baked into our genes, locked into the primal ancient skillset possessed by every human on the planet. If I need to grill a hunk of flesh over a fire, darn it, that is my legacy as a participant in the human race. Right?

    The hot grease that dripped from my slow-cooked ribs was hardly the ignition source for a mushroom cloud, but it sure felt that way when my meticulously prepared coals and carefully laid plans turned into a small inferno a few seconds into the grilling process.

    Gaige is in over his head, it often seems. He so desperately wants to be a professional. He so eagerly wants to build himself up as a something he is not. Luckily Crick’s head is a little closer to the ground.

  • Spring Snow

    It’s the latter half of May and after weeks of sitting in the backyard sun, cooking out on the campfire grill, starting the garden work, and contemplating the birds, bugs, and flowers, it snowed last night.

    It snowed a heap.

    So much for spring. Well, for today, at least.

    Of course, I stepped out into the yard and checked my trees. The apple tree was covered (no, COVERED) in blossoms and while snow does not equal freezing or frost (mind = blown?) the chill temperatures are not great for those delicate little flowers-soon-to-be-apples.

    The dog on the other hand was in her glory.

    Born in September, our eight month old puppy spent the first couple months of her life with her litter inside, in a heated garage, cuddled up with her siblings.

    Then we adopted her, and brought her home in a minor blizzard, and set her in the backyard to do her puppy-business in a hand-depth of powder.

    The first four months of her life here were bound in snow, covered in ice, and braced in chill winds. In short, she grew up in the snow covered city and will likely forever be a snow dog.

    It’s probably not surprising then, that when I opened the back door and let her into the yard as the flakes began to fall, her reaction was…

    Nostalgia?

    Elation?

    Unfiltered puppy excitement?

    I didn’t think I could express this any other way than to share a bit of art with you: she ran in circles for nearly ten minutes, chased snowflakes and leapt through the patches of accumulation settling into the greening grass. She shook and jumped and played, and in the end I had to coax her inside with a treat to dry off and warm up.

    At least one local was excited about the temporary change in the weather, I guess.

  • Misinformed

    the moment
    a tree
    falls in the forest
    crashes
    breaking branches
    thrashing limbs
    cracking wood
    makes a sound
    heard by just one
    witness
    who tells the story
    to friends
    who were not there
    an audience
    unable to confirm
    the moment
    the noise
    the disruption to
    the peace of the forest
    exaggerated
    amplified
    by words
    feelings
    hunches
    fears
    misrepresenting and
    unable to precisely
    articulate
    the moment

    – bardo

    I have reserved some space on this blog each week to be creative, and to post some fiction, poetry, art or prose. Writing a daily blog could easily get repetitive and turn into driveling updates. Instead, Wordy Wednesdays give me a bit of a creative nudge when inspiration strikes.

  • Sylvan

    This language of mine is so filled with clever words meant to precisely describe many things. Other words have meanings that are soft, fluid and flexible that they are used to describe concepts so vast as to make the boundaries of those definitions fuzzy and flexible.

    To me, sylvan feels like on of those words.

    SILL - vann

    Living in or simply relating to the woods.

    To me, growing up this word had a fuzzy meaning that was almost opposite of it’s actual definition.

    Sylvan meant a trip to the beach.

    Not a great beach.

    Yet a twenty minute drive from my house was a large prairie pond called Sylvan Lake. On a summer Saturday we’d drive out, swim in the shallow, muddy water, wander the path along the town, and eat candy or ice cream.

    Or later, “Want to go to Sylvan this weekend?” As a teenager with driving license this was a epic getaway far away and out of town.

    The shores of Sylvan Lake, the lake, is not devoid of trees by any means and I imagine now, knowing the definition of its alias, that once long ago it was revealed by explorers and granted a name because it was a huge lake in the middle of a woods. Today it is but a dent in the vast agricultural Canadian prairies, an impression in the otherwise rolling flat lands that happens to contain water, support a small town, and attract city folks for their weekend getaways.

    I’ve since travelled to many beaches touching many lakes, rivers, oceans, and warm blue seas. It still echoes back to my youth when I hear this word, yes.

    But my association with this word has mostly reverted to moments more like the photo in this post: the quiet of the woods, the majesty of a living forest, and the peace that comes from walking among the trees.

  • firewood

    the fate of a tree brings a curious twist
    starting as seed
    on wind, through mist
    tucked into the soil
    spattered with rain
    sprouting and growing new heights to attain
    shrugging snow, budding leaf
    basking summers often brief
    sunlit evenings casting long shadows
    brilliant colours before even more snows
    year after year, decades pass, seasons withdraw
    until fate arrives
    as a wind
    or a flame
    or a saw
    to be hewn and moved
    lugged, logged and planed
    milled into geometrically linear grained
    lumber.
    or not.
    maybe nothing more than a log for a fire
    split
    axed
    set hot
    aflame and a flame to admire
    to warm hands
    hearts
    and cook sizzling food
    a curious twisting fate
    from tree to fire wood.

    – bardo

    A cubic meter of firewood landed on my front lawn yesterday and I spent well over an hour carting and stacking it while feeling a bit bittersweet on the fate of these trees to become fuel for my future backyard fires rather than, say, lumber for the doghouse that I built a couple weeks ago.

    I have reserved some space on this blog each week to be creative, and to post some fiction, poetry, art or prose. Writing a daily blog could easily get repetitive and turn into driveling updates. Instead, Wordy Wednesdays give me a bit of a creative nudge when inspiration strikes.