Self Portrait as a Winter Pine, 2006

A view from West Vancouver's Lighthouse Park, grey curtains of rain moving slowly across Georgia Straight. Silver-soft ocean, a texture I always associate with Sugimoto's sea-studies. The park trails a mix of mud and blowdown, fallen timber stacked like cordwood in the underbrush. The Guy Edwards Memorial Tree gone, just a thirty-foot high snag, the rest of the trunk and branches scattered below. Pitch leaking everywhere, the smell sharp in the wet air. Goretex jackets and dogs bobbing among the trees, the light too low to make anything except out-of-focus studies. Back along Marine Drive, rain falling steadily now, past wreathes and Christmas lights marking the ends of long West Vancouver driveways, past twigs and debris piled in the gutters; dumpsters; construction rent-a-fences; old gardens; the scent of winter earth.

Last Christmas in the old house, its ticking fireplace and thick red living room carpet. Freddy the cat, the neighbors' pet and honorary Brayshaw family member, prowls up and down stairs, eddies round like smoke with his wide green eyes and huge grey tail. My father, seated in the living room rocker, slowly describes his father's life. James Brayshaw, b. 1900, master mariner, captain of Mackenzie River paddlewheelers, Hudson's Bay Company western arctic supply ships, the M.V. Lady Rose. Dad passes over a worn page from the Vancouver Sun, dated 1955. A 3500 word account, by oral historian Barry Broadfoot, of a day's journey from the foot of Richmond's No. #2 Road to the Gulf Islands and back aboard the Lady Rose. A black-and-white photograph of Grandpa at the rail.

"'Come back again,' says Captain Brayshaw, 'and bring your friends.'"
- posted by cjb @ 3:09 PM