I’m getting ready to go to America. It is always a trip. I know the chocolate bars will be the same as in Canada, and the mall stores and the road signs. It looks the same but I am not fooled for long. If you don’t think the USA is a foreign nation you should …
Author: carmen
Searching for Patti’s bike
Patti’s bike got stolen. The old sad story: locked with a flimsy cable lock outside the caf´é and, snip! Gone. Patti is PattiPow: choir leader, local hero, my loyal chum and my steadfast companion. And Patti’s bike is Patti’s bike: her well-tuned Brodie that fit her so well, her wheels, her ride, her own steadfast …
Always leaving, always coming home
Go away with no string on your straw sandals. —Dogen Zenji Today I left home and arrived home. I wedged the door of the turtlebus closed with a stick, and rode the ferry across the Salish Sea. Home to the Appias, Apt. 306. Home to my storage locker full of clothes and photographs and love …
I am a bird nerd
The surf scoters have arrived. Burly black sea ducks with fat orange beaks and bold white mohawks, they dive one by one in rapid sequence and then pop up again like arcade ducks. They cluster above the sandbar and swallow mussels whole. A few sleek grebes dive with them and sometimes they surface with little …
Bike crazy Cumberland
I’m at the library in bike crazy Cumberland BC. I had not been off-island (Cortes, that is) for months. So in defiance of the Weather Forecast (pooh i say!) i leapt abike and pedaled off and away, cross island and through Campbell River and beyond. After 30 flat but boring kms on the old Island …