Category: Notes

Beauséjour, MB – Alexandra Lucas

October

Autumn is always an exciting time of year for me. When we were kids, September meant brand new supplies for work and creativity — new paper, binders, notebooks, and all the mark-making implements that went with them. It meant new beginnings, regardless of what had gone before, and they held limitless possibilities. September was also a month of birthdays — my sister’s, my cousin’s, and my mother’s.

Ah, but October! It arrived with a hush and a promise of unfathomable magic.

It would bring crisp mornings. Deep red, yellow, and orange leaves were everywhere. It brought ripe berries shining from leaf-lean bushes, and woodsmoke drifting in the air. Thanksgiving arrived on the second Monday of the month.

But the last week was the best of all.

It began with my father’s birthday, then it was mine, and then it was Halloween.

My birthday began by watching the teacher write the date on the board and it glowed with a magic like no other date. It was my day at last. You know, it still feels like that every year, only now it glows from my phone.

One year, my mother made an orange cream cake with my name on it. To this day, it stands out from the parade of chocolate cakes with witches and pumpkins.

The year I turned seven, we were in the middle of moving. We went out for dinner and I was allowed to choose the restaurant. I was positively giddy and chose Woolworth’s lunch counter with the orange drink fountain at the end. I even had fries with my toasted bacon and tomato sandwich.

And then we went to the carnival!

Later, I was blowing out the candles on my birthday cake with the doll I’d won at the carnival — the doll that probably cost my parents several times its worth in tickets for darts to pop balloons. But there is no price on how thrilled I was to do it myself.

Three days later, it was Halloween with caramel apples — still warm — waiting at the corner house if you got there in time. And really, does it get any better than that for an October kid? I can tell you now, it does. My first grandchild arrived in October.

Today, October feels just as magical as it did all those years ago. I hope your birthday month is every bit as lovely.

On a Cape Breton Beach 2018 – Alexandra Lucas

One Small Step

Thresholds are interesting in themselves. They are the gatekeepers of entries and exits from where we live in the present to somewhere else in our future. They have an architecture all their own.

Depending on what lies across it, a threshold can bring feelings of exhilaration or terror. Think about stepping through the door of a plane at 30,000 feet even when parachutes are secure. It’s that moment of crossing, stepping through change from one place or state to another that seems to defy space and time itself.

Commonplace is such a threshold for me. It is a life-crossing and a map-making expedition through past and future.

Some of the things I want to explore:

• Writing about the world as I see it and imagine it in short stories, poetry, and a novel.
• Playing with new ways of making art through different surfaces and media.
• Lassoing the family history information and assembling a book for print.
• Organizing and labelling all the photographs — negatives and prints — so they can be easily found and identified by those who will eventually inherit them.
• Trying many new ideas to make my lifestyle healthier, more interesting, and more fulfilling.

I think of it like a gap year at the other end of life. True, it might be a couple of decades, but it might be much shorter. It’s best to travel light — some bootscraping from the past and a bit of bootstrapping into the future.

It’s a bit daunting to be honest, but now that I’ve found the  Wokingham Borough Council fitness videos  on YouTube, I’m feeling rather fearless.

Perhaps there will even be some ballroom dancing along the way — or not.