I was noticing the dew on the grass outside. The dew on grassblades and some of the thinner rose petals. I was thinking there is a season in spring and in fall that are the times of the dew. And then comes the frost which is a kind of frozen dew. I was noticing how self-contained and kind of magical each drop of dew is. And I started looking up what dew is and found a mountain in Chile called El Tofo where a community came together with some help from Canadian scientists to make a fog fence that created a sustainable water source from invisible dew in the air coming off the ocean below. I learned about medieval dew ponds and dew rainbows on spiderwebs and the way that dew works in the desert and in alchemy, and its relationship to the Eros and sex and flowers in early Greek myth. I learned about dew drops made by the moon and dewdrops that when added to the last vertebrae of the spine can bring a person back to life, and I thought, how can I explain to you how interesting dew is in ink making? How singular and of both earth and sky, cold and heat is a drop of water condensed from nothing. How like ink is dew. But I did not want to explain anything in detail because mystery. And because you could look all of this up. And because I’ve been too tired to make any ink this week even though there is so much to forage out there. And because I wanted to tell you a story from my childhood.
After I lived on the uninhabited little island in the pacific with the giant slugs and fir trees and the salty piney air where my sister and I explored the tide pools for purple starfish and orange sea cucumbers and barnacles where I learned about light and colour and foraging. After the little island, we moved to the big island with the old Russian house and the pear tree and the artist uncle. After that we moved to the edge of the prairies West Hawk lake and looking out across the lake, Mama would point to the smudge on the horizon in the late summer and say that’s where your Papa is fighting the forest fire. And after that we lived in a big city on a river where Judah was born and I had my plastic balloon on the end of string that I dragged with me everywhere. After we lived in the house up North with the white horse who used to knock over the metal bucket we collected water in from down the hill, and after the Stone House where I had the nightmares about the bear that ate me and whole family up, and a single dad studying to become a minister and his daughter came to live with us. After the house with all the dandelions where the water flooded in spring and we used to send messages in bottles and where Cathy taught me how to make traps in the sand and where there was a witch in the barn that had buried rubies near the fence with the rust stains that looked like gold.
After all those places (and maybe I missed a few) we lived in the little white house by the round deep lake and that is the place where I most go back to in my childhood memories. That house had a snail shell beach that almost glowed in the moonlight with a little rowboat resting on the beach and the boat was always sinking if you tried to take it out to the tiny island in the middle of the lake where Leah fell in, but it was simple and beautiful and made by hand by my Papa. That house on the lake had a big pink Canadian shield rock as big as a hill and as round as a turtle shell buried in the forest. That place had a pure cold spring that Mama found coming out of the ground and where we let the baby painted turtle go, and a bee-keeper’s house that Papa fixed up with a woodstove and a new roof and a rug as a place for Mama to just be. It had friendly neighbours and a big barn that was locked but you could squeeze in through the doors and find the old stage coaches with whips and piles of old molding Victorian books, including the one with fairy tales like The Girl who Trod on a Loaf of Bread which terrified and delighted us. We loved the lake which was round and deep and was rumoured to have a very old lake trout living in the bottom of it. But what I remember best of all was the road that snaked deep into that landscape and finally ended just after our house. And I remember the road because of the witch.
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