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Ni & I, happy together in the back woods of Ontario. Near Sioux Narrows, Ontario; June 2018.
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It feels a bit funny to return to this place after so many moons away. And yet, there is a special familiarity that goes along with it. Like the feeling that comes with slipping on my grandmother's tattered old denim shirt after a long period of forgetting of its existence in the drawer.
Sentiments of old, hanging around like forgotten laundry sunbaked on the line just out of one's peripheral vision. Crisp and well-worn at the same time. This is how I feel about this old place.
There has been a great shift since the last entry I wrote in March. Little did I know then that I was carrying the bright spirit that I feel move within me as I write. Iain and I are set to welcome a child into our fold sometime in November. I look forward to meeting the little person we created together in great love. Will the child have the laugh lines of his father? Will he have my Hildebrandt nose given to me by the many, many strong women who came before me? I hope so, but I also love that I can't possibly know--until I know. Great things are worth waiting for.
And I have been waiting for you for a long, long time my love.
My wonder and delight in this pregnancy is too vast to pen right now so in lieu of words, I will leave these two images. Perhaps you will note the delight in our eyes as we grin into the lens.
A few weeks ago I shot the wedding of a dear friend out at her parent's cottage near Sioux Narrows in Ontario. On our slow and intentional journey homeward, Iain and I (both being tree planters at some point in our twenties) were simultaneously drawn to the obvious mouth of a cut block weaving jaggedly off the highway. Without a word, Iain pulled the truck off the highway and into that mouth and we drove in silent reverie of the strange beauty around us. Some of the land had been freshly shaved down and the scent in the air was heady and intoxicating. Menacing slash piles giving off plumes of scent I would pay a trillion dollars to bottle and wear as perfume on my most sacred evenings. I communicated silently with my child as I tend to do, explaining to him the wonders of working a land stripped raw of it's natural bounty. It is a harsh reality to stand amidst. And yet, it is an honour to participate in the process of thoughtfully replenishing the contours of such a naked place.
As we drove deeper and deeper into the land, the lane narrowed to a point where even the slim truck could not move through. We stopped and stepped out into a deafening world of black flies and other unidentifiable creatures and I stripped nude so Iain could capture my changing body in another beautiful place. There was no evidence of the work of horrifying machinery where I stood. Just wildflowers and a wall of greenery and me and the new contours of my own body. Wondrous! Sadly the image never came up on the roll, but we both know what we captured in that place. I hope the feeling imprinted on my son as these attempts to remember imprint on film.
We will take you along to beautiful places, child.
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Self portrait in the funny little mirror from Ni's old 1980 Granada. Wind whipped and happy. Near Sioux Narrows, Ontario; June 2018. Five months along with you, child.
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