Weekly Stories

Butterflies and Creepy Cowboys: a girl turns 13

“You always drive a cute little sports car, Mom, and it always has a rotten banana in it.” I laugh and bat at a fruit fly before I shift gears. She’s so right. Between the two houses and her dance lessons and my gigs, we spend an awful lot of time in the Mini Coop. For her thirteenth birthday she wanted to recreate her two fondest memories from childhood. One was a hike through the “magic forest” with her Dad and one was a road trip with me. She puts a new CD in and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs blast…

A Greater Chance at Sunrise

I awoke in the blue hour with a nightmare (the constant plague of the active imagination). Every time I batted my eyes a new bloody dismembered something was in the muddled straw of my Uncle’s barn, being nibbled by a pig crossed with a baby. Yeah. That isn’t creepy. Last week it was sharks. My entire cast of Les Belles Soeurs were pulled under to be munched on, one by one. I managed to get my daughter on top of the upturned boat but some of the cast members were trying to pull her off so they could scramble…

giving and receiving criticism: what to say after a sucky bad play

I’ve waited to write this post for a time when I’m between shows as both a participant and as an audience member. Thirty years into the biz, I’ve seen many brilliant moving and life changing shows and I’ve even been in some. I’ve also been in and seen shows that have made me want to perform a root canal on myself with dirty pliers while listening to The Backstreet Boys rather than sit through act two. It’s the latter that can be tricky to negotiate when someone asks with flushed excited cheeks, “So, what did you think?!” There is a…

settling

Nora and I are standing at a forty-five degree angle eating someone else’s Thai food. I would have never normally chosen green curry octopus but there was a mix up of take-out bags and some lucky person made off with our double Pad Thai and almond chicken. The chewy curved criss-crossed flesh of the octopus reminds me of a bike tire. That said, the flavour is superb. I give Nora all the prawns and salmon chunks in the green curry and I take the octopus and the three large fishy mussels, but my motherly charity only goes so far. We…

reno or renew

Talking with the Eagle Cliff Beach babes. They are true blue Bowen locals with unobstructed views. They bring their own lawn chairs and vodka coolers onto the end of the dock. They know how to prop an umbrella up just so between the wooden slats. They are prepared to hang out all day under the sun and watch the children paw at floating logs and fish for mud sharks. I am particularly fond of D. She’s probably in her mid sixties, rocking a floral one piece with a skirt. She always dips in the ocean with her water noodle wrapped…

wake and woke

It’s a quarter to four in the morning and my head is whirling with private matters I won’t write about, so my blog has been empty while my heart has been full. Big shifts are happening: children finishing their school years and entering into the wider world of high school. My husband and I rethinking our priorities about where and what we call home. A couple of “wow” moments – and not the good “wow” – to talk through with two of my dear ones. A sudden death of one of the prominent loved patriarchs in the family. The impossible…

the sexiness of May

I think of Anita in May, because when the rhodos start to pop and the lilacs wave their frilly fronds and the tulips are standing at attention, she exclaims, usually with both hands up in delighted exasperation at the excess, “Vancouver is so slutty, slutty gorgeous, look at THAT just LOOK AT THAT!” I love Anita and I love her love of flowers. I carted home a bunch of snap dragons marigolds and petunias in the back of my mini over to the island and found it to be a strangely erotic experience. The fecundity of the blossoms, the leather…

why brace against joy?

The ferry pulls into Snug Cove on this grey and drizzly fresh day. Jupiter has been raucous as Joan Jett all night and now, this morning, he is half lidded, spent from his thundering, eyeliner all smokey and smudged, casually vaping huge flamboyant puffs of white over the mountains. I have a deep clutching love for home; I’ve been away three days. I have a little love pack for my bunnies of apple and cilantro, missing their little fuzzy faces, the nagging fear of predators always gnawing away at the back of my mind since the mink slaughtered our hens….

Easter and abrupt endings

On our way back home from Easter at Grammy’s we stop in the small dry town of Merritt to fill our tank with gas. Across the boulevard is a teenaged boy up on the top of a dirty snowbank of a bluff, the highway bound traffic buzzing underneath him. He is wearing an old blue lumberjacket and baggy jeans. In front of him is a huge 80s style boom box. He is dancing to music we can’t hear over the rush of trucks and cars. All by himself. He is rocking out. He is foot loose. He is jumping around…

dogs and daffodils

The house is so quiet on Bowen, I could go out into the night and listen to daffodils unfurl. Yesterday I took my dog for his last forest walk, short but green. On our way home, despite the fact he was very unsteady on his feet…he took a sharp left and booted it down into a gutter to get his paws cooled with black mud and lick at the spring run off gurgling over the stones and moss. I’ve never been through this before. Having to be the one to say when. The day before, he had a bad spell…

Lucia Frangione