My First Day Back

It's Sunday and the sun beats down on Vancouver, forever mixed with an ocean breeze. Outside the window of the house I am staying at is a rain forest with trees the size of sky scrapers. I have just returned from The Centre, driving over the Lion's Gate Bridge with my window down, watching the boats float down False Creek. Deciding to blog, I have brought my MacBook outside where all I can smell is pine and cedar and soil and ocean. Later on, I will take my stuff to Shelley's one bedroom apartment and crash there for a week, living once again in the heart of my 404 past. This city, this province, makes my heart sing. It represents to me a time of redefinition and empowerment, heartbreak and bravery, healing and inspiration. I am so glad to be back.

Sounds like the Artist in Residence meeting between Mortlach and the coordinator at the Arts Board didn't go terribly well. The Saskatchewan Arts Board doesn't seem to advocate performing artists the way they do Visual Artists and they don't like it when a town like Mortlach applies for a grant with a specific artist in mind. I think they feel that that narrows the town's thinking. Personally, I think Mortlach's dreams for itself as a prairie village are anything but narrow. The town is not be discouraged and, more determined than ever, they are now finding other grants and other means to get me involved. I have to hand it to them, for a town of 200 people, they are rockin' and rollin'.

I am watching it unfold curiously. If Mortlach succeeds, I could have well paying artistic work until the end of 2010. If Mortlach fails, I could have the perfect excuse to come back to this place of sweet smells and green love. Either way, I win. Perhaps there will be a way to have the best of both worlds. As Rev C used to say, there is no reason we can't all have our cake and eat it, too.

For as happy as this place makes me, it makes my husband act weird. For him, this place is filled with ghosts and communities of people who know him as his old, brooding, badboy self. In Saskatchewan he has reinvented himself, but here he feels like no one will let him out of the tight, little box that he existed in for years. My hope is that if we move back we will move to the Island and thus it will be the first time that we live someplace where the slate is clean for us both.

Ahhhh, BC. I leave you with the image of that which is currently staring back at me...a cute husband and a huge trunk.