m e o w

After an early-childhood trauma, I spent some time attending both individual and group therapy. The counselors who lead the group sessions stand out in my mind like the hosts of Polkaroo; they were all smiles and friendly encouragement and their sessions seemed more like fun than anything. One day, our group took turns role-playing the members of a family (I realize, in hindsight, to observe how typical our notions of family behaviour were); other children in the group elected to be the 'mom' or the 'dad', 'brother'; etc...wanting no part of that, I asked the leaders if I could be the cat instead.

At the time, I was oblivious, but now, I'm embarrassed.

I wanted to be the family pet. What did those therapists think of me? What does that say about me as a person?

(Despite what I can only imagine must have been uncomfortable reluctance, the leaders let me make my choice and I proceeded to crawl around on the floor and generally avoided participating in their exercise as a normal person).

s t u c k

Holiday weekends mean making the drive home from Toronto to Kitchener-Waterloo. In theory, it's a relatively quick and easy commute; some people even make it daily, opting to live in one city and work in another. Unfortunately for Josh and I, this easy trip habitually takes us triple the time to complete.

Last night, we hopped in the car at 5:00 and rolled into our destination around 8:30; that's three and a half hours stuck in traffic, cooped up and going crazy from hunger pains and claustrophobia. When I was younger, I relished long car trips; when we made the three hour trip up north to my cousin's farm, or journeyed one hour west to my aunt's house in London I would fill the backseat with pillows and games and snacks. Now, I feel beyond restless.

On the plus side, we got to witness a breathtaking sunset and I took advantage of the photo-op. As we drove, I told Josh the old rhyme which had comforted me as a paranoid child with a foul-weather phobia: Red sky at night, sailor's delight; red sky at morning, sailor's warning. I remember looping that saying as I drank in the blood-red horizon from the passenger or back seat of my mother's car, assuring myself that the next day would be calm and bright.

(For the record, today is nothing but blue skies and sunshine!)

t r i o

Relics from an old, old time.

Long ago, my younger cousin and I spent an afternoon drawing caricatures while her sister and friend watched the original Pet Cemetery in the next room. Even though I was the eldest of us, I chickened out of watching right around the introduction of Zelda, the evil sister with meningitis; I excused myself, hid in my cousin's bedroom and together we whipped up page after page of drawings. She had a stack of templates which we traced over (while I attempted to erase the horrific things that I had just witnessed from my mind). Here are a few which I found this past week in a folder of old art: the golden trio, Ron, Hermione and Harry.

*

Love you Jes & Shelbey.

w a n d e r

Remembering, forgetting, amnesia, secrets, lies, truths, goals, hopes, dreams, nightmares. 

Time and place, coming and going, drifting away.

•

When I was little, I would walk to the wide windows of my bedroom and survey the land beyond; I gazed across the treetops and field and imagined that I was a princess in a tower, on the verge of adventure. 

As children, the capacity to manipulate existence with the mind is magic. Eventually, the world, it's rules and expectations fade those abilities away...but maybe it would be better if we  still allowed ourselves to detach from reality. 

b u b b l e . g u m

Those were the lyrics of my three year old self's song; I had learned it from two older girls --sisters-- at my babysitter's house. 

(I fully understand the appeal of teachig a little kid to say something borderline inappropriate, so I can't really blame them. My cousin Shelbey, who was, for a time, the youngest of our group, used to be able to speak in this great creepy voice, halfway between a gremlin and an evil henchman; my cousins, siblings andI used  to coach her to say things like "I'm going to run you over with my tractor" or "I'll cut you up into little pieces and hide you in the walls". We found this endlessly amusing.)

For whatever reason, I loved this disgusting song. My grandmother would despair of me singing it, asking in a sweet voice "Samantha, isn't there something else that you would like to sing for Gramma?"; nope, I knew what I liked, and I liked Bubblegum

My grandparents once made an audio recording of me at that age, and it's there; my baby voice sings slowly, putting emphasis on noooooose and BUM and stretching out bub-ble-gum! (It's pretty adorable). I also sing Happy Birthday to my mum and my tiny voice rumbles progressively lower on "dear mommy".

I'm so grateful to have that evidence of my former self.

•

There was another song, possibly by Sharon, Lois and Braham* about "sticky, sticky, sticky, sticky bubblegum".

I learned that lesson first hand the night when I decided to save a piece of chewed up gum by sleeping with it in my hand. Palming a wad of gum seemed like a brilliant idea at the time, but needless to say, come morning my leg was covered in a sticky, pink mess. My mum threw me immediately into the bath, and I'll never forget the pain of trying to pick it off my skin.

•

*This trio was a favourite of mine growing up. The first three things that come to mind are:

Being sick late at night and being allowed to lie up on the couch and watch tv; the one thing on for me was (maybe) a concert featuring Sharon, Lois and Braham in a train station.

The Elephant Show theme song.

The Halloween episode where the children went trick-or-treating in broad daylight and were given eggs and vegetables in lieu of candy; they had UNICEF boxes and seemed estatic about the whole situation (which as a child, made me sad).

f l a s h b a c k . f r i d a y .

My brother Dylan (up there on the right!), once told me that I dressed like a clown ( and possibly that I was an embarrassment). At the time, I had been wearing a bright orange coat, green, patterned canvas boots and knee high socks, so maybe he was right.

*

My mum's parenting theory was always "as long as it isn't morally wrong or physically threatening, let your children make their own decisions"; this applied to clothings as much as anything else. I often tease her about the outfits that I had access to as a child (there were a lot of leggings, how ironic), but really, I think I looked pretty cool. Thanks mum!

i n . b l o o m

My mum loves gardening. While I was still living at home, she would often try to persuade me to come outside and help her tend to her plants; she would (and still does) joke about paying me fifty cents to weed.

Even though I love flowers as a visual concept (as explained here), I was never very keen on the concept of gardening; one (among many) of my most dreaded summer phenomena was the experience of being dragged along to an open air garden centre; the heat and inevitable swarms (or so it seemed to me!) of bees and other bugs were unbearable to me. I was also always nonchalantly adamant that when and if I ever had a garden of my own, I would simply throw hand-fulls of seeds onto the earth and let nature take its course.

It's a mystery to me, but so far this summer I feel like I'm obsessed with plants; I keep pausing when I pass by beautiful gardens in bloom and can't resist capturing them on camera.

*

When I was little and we lived out in the county, there was a giant peony bush on the corner of our property; I remember staring in morbid fascination at the lush blossoms swarming with gigantic black ants.

f l a s h b a c k . f r i d a y . 2

Lately, it feels like all I think about is the girl in these photos: the versions of myself that existed once, long ago. I imagine them still out there somewhere, preserved on alternate plains of reality; in memory, I jump from self to self as easily as flipping through photographs, remembering.

She is me and I am her, but she's gone forever. I must finally be an adult now, mourning my childhood as if that little girl really did die.

w o r d s

I seriously miss renting movies. 

I grew up in a small town. We lived in a little farmhouse with a pond and raspberry bushes in the spacious backyard.

We didn't have cable, so renting videos was always a favourite treat for my younger brother and I. My mum would often take us into town to the general store where we were each allowed to pick out a movie. The store was located in the main floor of a white house with a pillared front porch; I called it The Pumpkin People because they put pumpkin-headed scarecrows out there on Halloween. I remember there being candy, ice cream, crafts and a wall of VHS tapes.

Almost every time we visited that store, I choose the same movie to take home: Serendipity. The story centered around a little boy who, while exploring the arctic with his scientist parents, gets trapped on a iceberg which floats down to the tropics. When the ice melts, he finds a giant pink polka-dot egg, which hatches into a fuchsia and green sea-serpent named Serendipity. They live together on an island with a melancholy mermaid-princess with purple hair and annoying fantasy creatures and battle a mean, old sea-captain. I was completely obsessed and played it on a near constant loop. Having re-watched it as an adult, I seriously admire my mother's patience in allowing that to happen!

It's colourful, nonsensical and slightly annoying, but still absolutely magical to me (and the theme-song was super catchy!)

f l a s h b a c k . f r i d a y

I. Made. This.

While recently exploring some older folders on my laptop, I stumbled upon this embarrassingly amazing gem; my family didn't have a computer until I was about thirteen, but when I did, boy did I make up for lost time. (Remember when not having a computer wasn't such a big deal?)

In true geek fashion, I spent hours combing the internet for desktop themes, icon packs and wallpapers of my favourite characters; I was like a little digital-hoarder, saving and organizing anything that caught my magpie eye.

Rainbow Shells! The Mist Dragon! Alfador!

I can't stop laughing.

w o r d s

When I was young, I wasn't exactly a fan of the outdoors.

When Alia Shawkat's character in Whip It said, "I didn't have a Barbie-roller-skates phase; I had a fat-kid-sits-inside-and-reads-a-book phase", she was speaking about me. Surprising, I know.

In grade-school, my brother and I would trek up north to the Bruce Peninsula and spend weeks of our summer vacations living with our cousins on their farm. It was the kind of place where children were encouraged/expected to play outside for most of the day, which would have been fine if I hadn't been so afraid of nature. Their tall, white farmhouse stands out in my mind like a beautiful, cozy beacon, the sole refuge in a vast expanse of windy forest, field, mud and angry chickens.

They also had a cottage on the lake where we would swim, catch frogs and crayfish, explore islands. I always had this vague feeling of not belonging there; I was the awkward, round girl who just wanted to be quiet and inconspicuous, constantly homesick in a dull way. I wasn't outgoing or fun; I felt like someone who had to be tolerated and taken care of. I wanted to escape from that idea of myself, to hide away from the uncomfortable reality that I was facing...so I begged my aunt for books to read.

She gave me A Spell for Chameleon, Piers Anthony's first Xanth novel; I remember looking at the paperback's golden-brown cover and not expecting much. Over the next few days, I sat sideways in an old armchair and read, read, read and (again) fell in love with a book-world full of magic, bravery and puns. It was there that I was introduced to words like scintillating and I readily latched onto the concept of elegant synonyms that evoked more vivid meaning that their commonly used counterparts.

Over the ensuing years, I devoured that series and have since reread many of its volumes. They became a part of me, a piece of the collection of items and ideas and experiences that have shaped me; it's interesting for me to think back, as if I'm still that insecure little girl, longing for an escape and finding one there in the pages of someone else's book, someone else's home. That discomfort and anxiety that I felt as a child has translated into a cherished part of my psyche.

Remember: positivity can grow from negativity.

f l a s h . b a n g

Thunderstorms: in my childhood, I dreaded them.

The heralding humidity made my skin prickle and my habitually nervous stomach churn into overtime. I remember the summer sight of heavy pastel evening, the sky a low canopy of clouds, cotton soaked in ink. Once the storm started, the rumble and abrupt BANGs were always cataclysmic to me; I felt as if I was the only one on earth who realized that this event was the apocalypse.

My mother loved them, and would celebrate their coming by opening the house's windows to listen to the rain and the low BOOMs. Once, when I was about ten years old, the anxiety that this caused me was so terrible that she had a friend on the phone tell me that he was a meterologist and that no, thunderstorms wouldn't kill me, and that yes, it was alright to open the windows during them.

When I was a few years older, I devised a sort of coping ritual; in the muggy heat of summer vacation, I decided that thunderstorm time would be art time. Along with my younger brother, I spent those nightmare evenings in my bedroom, watching cartoons on my tiny tv and drawing. I created a comic character named Mr. Olive Head; he was a news reporter who was basically an olive with a hat and a microphone.

By the time I was in my 20s, I should have been able to fully cope; this wasn't the case. Once upon a May sunset, I was caught out near Spadina Ave. underneath ominous clouds. The date whom I was with was completely nonchalant; every CRACK of thunder or bright flash made me flinch involuntarily and his comments made me feel ashamed of my reaction. I walked towards shelter as quickly as possible, wondering why I wasn't allowed to be afraid and beginning to question the lack of validity that others gave to my feelings.