Chapter 111
For our last hurrah of this year, I find myself in a holding pattern… sitting waiting for my number to come up at a Service Canada facility. What joy. This morning began with a swift tramp around the woods following the joyously bouncing bottoms of three canine friends. Spectacular clear blue sky after a spectacular clear full moon night during which I had to stop and admire the gemstone glitter of snow crystals in moonlight more than once.
The Christmas season is upon us. We have the beauty of our fabulous surroundings, the exquisitely orchestrated rainbow world of self and everything else. Did you make kites when you were a kid? I used to love building kites; fragments of coloured tissue-paper wrapped around splinter- thin dowels hung together with a central knot of thin string. Adding the tail… butterfly bows of rainbow hues dotted along another length of string. Then finding a place to fly: High on the south Downs of Kent, a great place to fly a kite. Endless rolling acres of green turf building upward to the sky and falling away beyond sight. As a small person, these places were limitless, thousands of oak trees and millions of bluebells in the spring. On the outer edges of the downs we found crumbling concrete Pill Boxes, remnants of a war that now is beyond memory for most. I unearthed thick smoothed chunks of greenish glass, fragments of a magnifying mechanism, treasured for years among my many magpie finds.
Another time, far, far to the north, on the edge of a small, lesser loch in Invernessshire (I enjoy the three esses in that last). The one purchased kite I remember, a novelty – manufactured from the new, exciting, transparent plastic – a clear membrane with the image of a kite, wings spread broad, across the widest part of the diamond. It flew badly compared to our home-made ones & I remember it plunging into the chilly peat-hued waters of the loch more often than not.
This evening I was flying my nostalgia kites through clouds of rose, slate, cerulean, aegean, umber, milk and golden haze. Walking trails between towering trees I lost the canvas of colour above on which to play. My gaze was harnessed by the undulating ground and the navigation of ice, snow, fallen trees, low-hanging branches and plenty more to bring me back to the present moment.
Later, back in the ease of the interior world, I remember the brass of my youth, not just the thre’penny bit and the Yorkshire slang of my parent’s folk. I relished the tours of Lower Darwen Paper Mill with my Dad. He showed me the whole process at the age of four or five. I saw the giant bales of shredded newspaper – oooh, did someone mention recycling? – that were burst open into gigantic brass and copper-bound vats. Like gargantuan bowls of porridge stirred by invisible, yet immense, submerged arms. The resulting pulp was spat slowly out across a broad brown felt blanket about half an inch thick. This blanket wrapped and rolled along a series of giant brass cylinders, progressively pressing and squeezing the pulp into paper, the water draining away through the woollen fibres beneath. A whole complex sequence of rollers and presses and various bopamagilvies, all kinds of lime- encrusted taps and pressure gauges, some misted over with decades of use, men in tin hats and overalls, specks of pulp like concrete blobs adhered to almost everything. As I recall that now, I realize that my Dad had specks of pulp stuck to him for most of my childhood, one way & another. He started his work life in that Mill and ended his work life closing it down–a hard way to wind down a life & one that so many have gone through as change keeps pace with us all.
We had a long pine table in the kitchen with stools and benches around. That table was, more often than not, sheathed in a cloth of white paper and mounted with crayons and pencils. We wrote messages, doodled, dawdled and created magical sketches of meaninglessness on that table. Each time the paper cloth was filled, it went to light fires. We replenished from a great roll of paper that Dad brought home from time to time, an end-of-line quantity, too small for the mill to process.
Those brown woollen felt blankets populated my early years – bed covers, insulation, mattress for camping, dressing up. When I finally achieved my ultimate dream of a pony, they became outstanding horse blankets, along with my baler-twine-made harnesses. I even built a pantomime horse complete with rolling eyes and moveable mouth – my friend & I performed a pantomime dance in a horse made from paper- pulp-pressing blankets. I must have been about 12. Not much has changed. Everything is different.
Anybody fancy a bit of panto?
With gratitude and love,
Kat Dancer
bodymudra@gmail.com
www.kat-dancer.com
415.525.2630, ph/txt/wtsp
