I wasn’t crazy about writing when I was a kid, but I did like it when the teacher gave us a picture as a starting point, especially if the picture inspired questions. Who? What? Where? And the best one: Why?
What would I have written if she’d given us this photo (which she couldn’t have because I shot it just this weekend)?
What’s the story here? What do YOU think?
It’s easy to love the colours of a Caribbean sea, captured during my first ever vacation to a warm place last month.
But there’s beauty to be found in the often monochromatic world of a Canadian winter too. On the first day of this winter, I was struck by the bits of ice forming on the branches that overhung a widening of the river near my home and the pattern they made. (My dog was more interested in the sticks.)
Since the two Sock Fluff posts straddling this one address some of my reading pleasures when I was growing up, I thought it would be fun to post a photo of me taken during that period of my life. Here I am with my dad.
This is my mother dancing with my father in 1974. It’s one of my favourite pictures of her. Sadly my mother passed away in 1996 with COPD, the same condition that took the life of Peter Gzowski.
She would have been 86 in a couple of weeks. If you’re still watching over me, Mom – and sometimes I think she might be – happy birthday!
Of all the photos I shot during a spring river cruise from Amsterdam to Budapest a few years ago, my favourites fell into the category of “Doors & Windows”. This one was taken in Miltenberg, when I wandered away from the tour group, as I found I tended to do quite a bit.
How about you? Are you an organized cruise/tour kind of person or do you prefer to chart your own course? What’s the best holiday you’ve ever taken?
This month’s photo, like last month’s, was taken in Nova Scotia – this time on the beach at the Kejimkukik Seaside Adjunct. We’ve taken our Seaside Writing Workshop Retreat participants there each year, and hope to again this year, but in this photo it’s my lovely daughter enjoying the enormous sky and exploring one of the the massive rocky outcrops there.
I love taking pictures. Last summer someone complimented me on my eye and even said she’d like to hang some of my work in her gallery. I haven’t done anything about that yet, but her encouragement gave me the idea of sharing some of my photos on my blog.
I hope that what I pull from my files will give you some sense of a sight that has given me pleasure – and I hope it will give you pleasure, too.
For this wintry month (albeit not as wintry as some Januarys), I chose a what I believe is a Michaelmas Daisy. I took this picture in a Nova Scotia meadow early one September morning in 2010.
A sampling of captioned photos that I took in Monrovia between January 31 and February 4 is now up. I’ll be showing these and more at IBBY Canada’s AGM on Saturday, February 27. It is thanks to IBBY Canada that I have had the amazing opportunity to visit this remarkable country.
I’ve just finished reading The Native Commissioner by Shaun Johnson (winner of the Best Book In Africa Commonwealth Writers’ Prize 2007). I bought it while in South Africa, thinking it might offer me useful insight into the complex world of that beautiful country, and it did, to some extent, though of course there is a lifetime of learning to be done here.
The Native Commissioner is George Jameson, “deeply unsure of the morality of his work [during the early years of apartheid], but unable to escape it”. The novel is the story of his son, eight years old at the time of George’s death, piecing together a picture of his unknown father from papers in a box his mother has passed on to him.
There is a line in the novel about those white people who don’t seem to get that Africa is not just its wild animals and its dramatic landscapes; Africa is its people. It stood out among many great lines, perhaps in part because I had recently finished sorting through hundreds of photos taken in South Africa into “albums” – Kruger Wildlife, SA Plant Life, SA Scenery – knowing that different people will be interested in looking at different things. There’s also a SA Carver Family Connections album that I’ll send out to family, so maybe I’m not one of “those white people…”. Still, the line did give me pause.
I will go ahead, nonetheless, and offer up my South Africa albums for anyone interested in having a look.
Cruising down rivers and canals from Amsterdam to Budapest had its lovely moments, but the experience paled in comparison to our visit to South Africa and to my own time in Liberia in February. Not that I’m ungrateful for a season so rich in travel opportunities, but I do understand why “Another Bloody Castle” is how many sum up travel to a string of cities in Europe. Among low points: cold rainy weather and head colds when the weather improved, stretches of time on buses instead of on the ship because of water levels and ship damage, too much dependence on buses where we thought we’d be free to come and go on foot. Of course these complaints were put in perspective the night we docked unexpectedly so that a sick passenger could be taken to hospital, along with his wife. They were still in Turin, I believe, when we boarded our plane home on Monday.
We bring home good memories, too, though. Meals and conversations enjoyed with a number of Australians on board. Our initial delight at the narrow cobblestone streets lined with old houses. How luxuriously relaxed it was to float along with scenery showing increasing signs of spring passing by. The loveliness of the Rhine Valley vineyards (and yes, castles!) A concert in Vienna. The sight of Budapest at night.
But it’s good to be home – despite the snow and the wind - reconnecting with family and friends, our neighbourhood and our work.
See more photos from this trip.
