White Pine Christmas Tree

It's snowing flurriously, and too fluffy to do anything but delight in.

Balsam Christmas Tree

I found this tree discarded at the side of a snowmobile trail after a trail-clearing crew had gone through. It rode home in my backpack. The moon on the wall behind is a calendar.

Cedar Branch

I decorated a cedar branch one Christmas, trimming a tree that itself was a tree-trimming. Dental floss helped to anchor it.

Breakfast

The Beanius

In second grade we collected empty jars of baby mush, patted them to brimming with soil, and were issued a regulation bean seed to sow wedged against the glass. While other aspiring bean parents fussed over their jars, I ignored mine. With a snarl of beans tangling up the garden at home, I wistfully planted it hoping for a marigold. Soon my bean was winding its tendrils around the rings of Saturn. The other 23 jars on the windowsill contained fuzzy, mousey-grey, has-beans.

A show-off bean is a curse when you're so shy your only friends are imaginary, and suddenly teachers are congratulating you at recess and asking for gardening advice. The bean was a legend with my name on masking tape stuck to the bottom of its jar. In maniacal desperation to eliminate the cause of my unwanted fame I attempted a beanicide, hoping to poison the bean with icky paint water. It only grew more.

Bubbles & Spots

Yesterday I went for a 14 km hike and took photographs I'll be posting over the next few days. The colours are subdued so for contrast, here's the lily-pad girl illustration.

Under the Banana Tree

I graduated from art school fifteen years ago. At the time I lived in a small cedar-shake cottage beside a clump of gnarled lilacs. The cottage was probably not intended for year-round use and mould ate my mattress, so the floor became my bed. Each night I watched the moon and stars and treetops. One maple created the silhouette of a pipe-smoking man's head in profile. When the wind got up the man in the tree would laugh and swallow his pipe.

Burning Rubber

Buttercup-yellow Volkswagen beetles bear an uncanny resemblance to fried eggs sunny side up. Old Volkswagen campers remind me of toasters …

Luna Moth

Luna moths (Actias luna) reside in hardwood forests, their caterpillars especially love butternut, yellow birch, and beech trees. They are members of the giant silk moth family (Saturniidae) but unravelling a cocoon for silken thread would doom the chrysalid. The true, domesticated, mulberry-leaf-eating silkworms of China belong to a different family of moths. Luna moths lack mouths and digestive tracts, and live for only a week on wingspans of 10cm. They fly only at night. The moons on their wings are believed to resemble eyes and used to intimidate predators. It is like a treasure to know "chrysalid" derives from the Greek word for "gold."

Cuke Zeppelins

Years ago when my Aunt Grace sent me a basket of cucumbers from her garden, I couldn't stop laughing. It flummoxed everyone. So, by way of explanation, I made this drawing.

Devil's Paintbrush

Devil's Paintbrush is also called Orange Hawkweed (Hieracium aurantiacum). On sun-warmed afternoons, accompanied by crickets, they are the smell of Summer. It has long irked me to find this wonderful plant described in books as a weed. One book describes Devil's Paintbrush as "a beautiful but pernicious pest," which is something I've long aspired to being. In Spring I saw shelves bulging with pots of them at the Canadian Tire greenhouse. They were tagged at $3 each. I smiled. Conspiratorially.