Open your eyes

I’ll Never Gnome

Posted on April 25, 2012 by Laura

Another confession: I believe that Garden Gnomes have magical power.  It sounds totally illogical; I get that.  I mean, I understand that they are cement, or resin or something man made and I also know that they are, largely, made in giant factories.  Still, there is something enchanted about (some of) them.

I have not always thought this.  As a matter of fact, until a few years ago, I never gave Garden Gnomes a second glance or even a moment of consideration.   Everything changed about 12 years ago, I was a newly wed and even more newly living in Munich, Germany. I worked for NATO which was all the way across town on Cosimastrasse.  I had just started to learn the language and did not even know enough German yet to be able to order a semmel or to  ask for directions.  After a particularly long day at work, I accidentally transferred to the wrong bus and had no idea where I was, so I asked the driver in my best Genglish… and he suggested (I think) that I should get off and walk two blocks to the East and get on the correct bus.  This is when I got really lost.

I did not yet have a cell phone, and I was really panicked.  It is more than just a little scary to be alone in a foreign country when you cannot speak the language.  I walked, lost and lost in my own worry too.   I came to a small cottage style house which had a huge yard with a stream running though it.  The entire garden was filled with perhaps 200 Garden Gnomes who were working very hard on the property.  They had wheelbarrows and shovels, rakes, buckets, they were crossing the bridge.  Some were on break and sitting on spotted mushrooms, reading books, falling in love, chatting among themselves.  Others were enjoying a lovely picnic.  It was magic.  The property was perfectly meticulous and every single Gnome was well groomed and perfectly detailed as well as situationally detailed.   Seeing them, my worry washed away and I was drawn into their world.  I walked around the little picket fence and looked at each of them, wishing as much now that I had a camera as well as a cell phone, because I thought, no one is going to believe this.  So lovely, so fantastic, I stayed there perhaps an hour watching them.

It was coming to dusk and so I thought I will walk back again about 30 blocks to where I transferred and see if I can get home to my family and I memorized the route as I walked so that I could come back again with a camera.

Eventually, I did get home, and though I tried to get back to show my family that little cottage and the hard working Gnome community, I could never find it or them.  We put miles and miles on our punch buggy looking for them.

Perhaps they were taken, house and all by the Garden Gnome Liberationists?  This rogue organization is connected to the European Gnome Sanctuary is plagued with issues of their own.

After this, I guess, it is no surprise, I am interested in these wonderful little guys and when I arrived back in Canada, I bought a few Gnomes.  They have become faded and sad looking over the years.  This year with the Tiny House built, I thought I would wash them and repaint them True to the magical Gnome – they come back to life with a bit of attention.

Here is their renewal.  Now I am going to hang out with my Gnomies… Boom-bada-bing!

“To my amazement I have heard that there are people who have never seen a gnome. I can’t help pitying these people. I am certain there must be something wrong with their eyesight.”

~ Axel Munthe, Swedish psychiatrist, 1857-1949

Categories: Art, Open your eyes, Tiny House Ontario, View, Writing | 4 Comments

Something Very Unusual.

Posted on April 20, 2012 by Laura

So, let me give you some preemptive information.  When I downsized a while ago, I thought I lost something which is important to me.  It is something very strange, and one of a kind, and probably weird.  Still, I think that by this post, number 101, you have already come to understand that I do not ever want to be a sheep (not an ordinary sheep anyway) and I guess the those who look at and read my blog also desire the unusual.

When I was a kid there was this thingamajig at the house of my grandma Violet Augusta Compton (Rickards) and my grandpa Robert Charles Rickards.  I would pick up the jar it was in and look at it for hours when I was a little girl.  I don’t know… I guess I thought it fascinating, you know, I still do.

I need to go back even farther… My great grandmother Violet Augusta Henderson (Compton) and my great grandfather Frances Gilbert Compton were living on the Carey-on Farm, on what is now the Rudledge Road, leading to Sydenham in Ontario.  The great depression was on when they moved there.  Times had been very hard… they had lost a lot.  This was their fourth home during those years. They could not keep up the payments and had been forced to move on, and move on, and move on.  They had nothing but kids to feed a couple of black faced sheep.  Sadly one of the sheep miscarried a malformed babe just after they arrived there.  The baby was stillborn with two and a half feet on every leg.  A sort of siamese triplet.  For some reason, my great grandfather who we all called Dad, took the foot off that poor lost babe to show it to others because he had never seen anything like it.  At this time in history, I guess, you would look it up on the internet, but then, word of mouth and show-&-tell was about all they had.

Anyway, the depression began to grind to a halt, and things got a lot better for Dad and Ma and their family.  But that unusual sheep’s foot was there and somehow it became sort of synonymous for changing luck – like a rabbit’s foot… not so lucky for the rabbit – but you understand, just one of those funny talismans.  Personal to us.

Anyway, my grandma gave me the foot many years back.  I had a rough time as a single mom and I guess she thought I could use the upswing… and now you know why I was so sad to lose it, happy to find it and now I will share it with you.

Here is the tiny footlet.  It is just an inch and a half long and from spring of 1937 (if I remember correctly); it is 75 years old.

Categories: Kingston, Nature, Ontario, Open your eyes, Simple living, Stuff, Tiny House Ontario, Writing | Leave a comment

Little Nut Struggles to Survive.

Posted on April 16, 2012 by Laura

Hickory Dickory Dock

The mouse ran up the clock

The cluck struck one

Down he’d come

Hickory Dickory Dock…

Every big nut tree starts from one little nut hitting the ground and surviving.  On my little slice of ancestral land, there are plenty of hickory trees.  Both the edible shag bark (sweet nuts) and the in edible (but horrible tasting) bitter nut trees are plentiful.

I mentioned before that the biggest shag bark hickory I ever saw is there.  I imagine that when she was a nut that my Lenape ancestors were still hunting there with bows and arrows.  I can only imagine what she has survived.  Drought, occupation, war, floods, the great depression, countless ice and wind storms and the axes of builders.  Still even a nut knows when life is ending and I too knew she was at the end of her life-cycle over the past couple of years.  With only a few branches remaining, and some animals have taken up living in her scars, she has been looking weak.  This spring when I came I found that her only two remaining large branches have left her and are sadly laying on the ground next to her.  Since the biggest one is her top branch, this loss reduced her height by half.  Just like human beings, she shrinks with age.

She looks small, feeble, fragile now.   Even so, she hangs on to her life with tenacity because seems to be budding out on her remaining little branches.  I believe what I see here is her last remaining spring hoorah before she becomes an apartment for the forest creatures.  Still, remember that perhaps 200 years ago she was just a little nut, she has lived a long life, witnessed much!

Hickory dickory dock.

Here is creation story which shows the importance of trees.

Lenapé Kishelamàwa’kàn

(The Lenape Creation Story)

Here is how the creation myth was explained by a Lenape patriarch when a Dutchman asked him where the Indians came from: He was silent for a little while, either as if unable to climb up at once so high with his thoughts, or to express them without help, and then took a piece of coal out of the fire where he sat, and began to write upon the floor.  He first drew a circle, a little oval, to which he made four paws or feet, a head and a tail. “This,” he said, “is a tortoise, lying in the water around it,” and he moved his hand round the figure continuing. “This was or is all water, and so at first was the world or the earth, when the tortoise gradually raised its round back up high, and the water ran off of it, and thus the earth became dry.

“He then took a little straw and placed it on end in the middle of the figure and proceeded, “The earth was now dry, and there grew a tree in the middle of the earth, and the root of this tree sent forth a sprout beside it, and there grew upon it a man, who was the first male. This man was then alone, and would have remained alone; but the tree bent over until its top touched the earth, and there shot therein another root, from which came forth another sprout, and there grew upon it the woman, and from these two are all men produced.”

*Jaspar Dankers & Peter Sluyter, Journal Of A Voyage To New York In 1679-80.

Categories: Environmentalism, Erazim Kohák, Forest, Kingston, Nature, Ontario, Open your eyes, Tiny House Ontario | Leave a comment

The Ancestors Noweta

Posted on April 15, 2012 by Laura

Before Tiny House Ontario was built, I thought I would build back a lot farther on my land than I did.  Perhaps it was the Pukwudgies, that made me dream about building?   I don’t think so, I feel that the ancestors have a plan for me. I dreamed a few nights before I was to build that my Grandma Moreland was standing there in the forest and she said that I should build it, there where she stood, so I did what she said.

I had been living there about a week last summer and while I sat writing I felt that there was someone watching me.  It did not scare me, but rather I felt it was someone familiar who would protect me, who made me Noweta (welcome).  When I looked up, I saw a face looking at me from a Maple tree that sits VERY close to the corner of the Tiny House.

I call this my Ancestor tree and I give the Ancestor treats like cheese, coffee and tea and I also burn sweet grass and white sage near the base.

This afternoon, I caught the Ancestor smiling at me and I decided to take his photo of the face in the tree and also to take a photo of the tree, from the upstairs window… I was very surprised to see such a straight line of trees in the forest!  Funny that I had not noticed it before but it really is right at the corner of the house so I cannot see in this due South-West Angle, at all, because of the corner beam.

I think I have to give a little bit more research into my Native Delaware Folklore!  Does anyone know about tree spirits?

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Categories: Erazim Kohák, Forest, Nature, Ontario, Open your eyes, Simple living, Tiny House Ontario, View, Writing | 1 Comment

Crooked Floor Cottage

Posted on April 2, 2012 by Laura

In order to purchase the land where Tiny House Ontario sits, I had to sell land with a very crooked little cottage on it.  It was a fantastic spot in beautiful Warkworth, Ontario.  You could walk to the village and yet you were secluded so much that you could bathe naked in the Mill Creek that ran around the ten acres.

This is the inside of the crooked cottage.  I started painting it about a year or maybe two ago and lost focus on it.  I pulled it out today and ta-da, it is done, like magic.

The stuff in the painting all has a story.  The tall cupboard was retrieved from the garbage in Germany when I lived there.  It is called a chimney cupboard.  The wash basin and pitcher are made of enamel and were handy (still are) because either there or Tiny House Ontario have running water.  The Victorian sideboard is from Eaton’s and cost ~$3.89 to order it from the catalogue about a hundred years ago.  I had the catalogue but I donated it a while back so I can’t look it up.  The sideboard now sits in my sister’s home, I gave this to her when she bought our great, great, great grandparent’s home. It is nice that it is there and it looks great in her kitchen.  The stairs stool was built by my grandpa and the kettle in the other room belonged to him and grandma.  The green footstool was also taken from the garbage; it has storage inside and I kept my dogs stuff in there.  The candle holder on the wall was made by the Philoxian hippies at their commune in Marlbank.  I bought it years ago when I was there with a group of friends from my youth; we were teeny-boppers then… I guess that this painting could just as easily be called waste-not, want-not or nostalgia.

I finally finished it today.  It is 18×20.

Categories: Art, Erazim Kohák, Laura Moreland, Off Grid, Open your eyes, Original Art work of Laura Moreland | 3 Comments