The China Teaset

This gift is very fragile, my mother said, eyes all wide and serious.  They were warm hazel-green eyes all flecked with gold. 

Fragile.  I nodded seriously.  You had to be very careful with it.  Careful, yes, I knew what that meant.  Fragile.  Easily broken.  Use gentle hands.

 

You have to take care of it, she said, keep it clean and be very gentle with it at all times.  It's real china, and that means it can chip, or get broken, and there are lots of parts.  If you're not careful you might lose one. 

She showed me then: a tiny little teaset.

I looked at it and thought about what chipping meant: breaking the paint, breaking the pattern.  I didn't like chipping.  No chipping.  And no getting broken, no breaking the set.  It was a tiny little teaset with a platter the size of real tea saucer which all the other tiny little pieces sat on: a tiny teapot with a slender spout and a separate little lid; two little cups with delicate handles painted gold, and more gold around the rim, and one gold-rimmed platter for each for them to sit on.  I noticed that the gold-lined rose was on everything: the tiny teapot, tiny cups and tiny saucers, the tiny little pitcher for cream (also with gold handles) and the tiny little sugar pot, with its own tiny little lid.  A lot of tiny little pieces, in white china with gilt handles and tiny little gold-outlined pink roses.  I treasured each of the pieces instantly: delicate prized possessions.  My first collected piece of art.

If you lose one... Look at me now.  Her warm eyes serious but pleased.  If you lose one, it can never be replaced.  Never.  It comes from a far away place and once it's gone, it's gone forever.

Forever.  If I lost a little piece, it would be gone forever.  No buying a new one at the store, not even in the city.  Not even in the Hat.  No making one.  No finding one by luck.  Gone.  Gone forever.  The sudden gravity of Forever making my heart drop, heavy and aching.  I shook my head.  I wouldn't lose any.

*

You used to play with that teaset all the time, my mother said, thirty years later. 

I did, I said.   I’d loved this little teaset.  I was washing it, rinsing every tiny piece very carefuly in warm soapy water,  letting it air-dry before polishing it with a soft cloth.  I tried to be very gentle with it.  Was there a time when not all the set fit on the tiny little platter?  I wondered if there didn't used to be four little cups perhaps and four saucers.  It all seemed even tinier now.  Amazing that there is still a complete set: teapot, two teacups, two saucers, cream pitcher, sugar bowl,  two tiny lids and the matching service platter.   All in white china, gilt edges, with a simple gold-bordered rose motif. 

Exactly like my mother's.

Remoteness

I'm currently in a very remote town in Saskatchewan.  I didn't use to think it was remote: small, yes, but not remote.  Things were also different back then.  I remember when the bus came to this town.

To me this is how remote is defined: if you can't get there by public transit, then you're travelling to a remote place.  I had to fly for four hours, stay overnight, and then travel by bus for another four hours late the next day.  And finally another hour by car, because the bus no longer goes to my hometown.  No public transport can take me home.

The bus people were very impressive however and fast, and even though the bus we were on had to return shortly into the trip due to a transmission problem, it was overall a good trip.  The bus people hustled.  They were well-coordinated, quick, polite, informative, calm, and well-prepared.  I watched them back the new bus up to the old trailer full of freight, reconnect it, change over all the luggage (including my daisy suitcase containing my entire wardrobe), and calmly inform us when it was time to switch seats, which was done with no trouble whatsoever.

And the bus ride itself was tremendous.  The bus seats are covered in soft blue velour-feeling material, clean, spacious.  Everyone gets two seats to themselves.  After travelling by plane, being on a bus is luxurious.  

Luxury.

I rode the STC line, which used to go to my hometown when I was a little girl.  My bus had great clean windows which, since we were going to be travelling south for four hours, faced into the prairie sunset after a rain.  The sun was sinking into a lush, rainy-in-July Saskatchewan setting.  I settled into my plush seat and prepared to enjoy the vastness that is the prairie.

I took some pictures through the glass:

Endless prairie poles.

Unbelievable water in the fields.

This is where we turned around.  Bad transmission.

Train tracks to nowhere.

Sun setting over slough water.

But then my camera ran out of juice and I just enjoyed the spectacle.  

The point is, yes, the flight was short, I enjoyed the layover in Saskatoon immensely, and the bus ride was both cheap (only $48) and moving, flooding me with feelings of love and nostalgia for the place where I grew up.

This still only got me to Swift Current.  After that: a one-hour drive by car.  Luckily the car contained both my dad and my uncle, who are some of my favourite people ever.  So we chatted and swapped stories and sped along the dark empty prairie highway under a black sky filled with stars.

It's not that the trip to get here is a bad trip.  I'm surprised more people don't take trips through Saskatchewan in the summer.  It's so beautiful, with so many secrets and good things: Pine Cree, Jones Peak, fishing at the dam, canoeing, camping, so much unspoiled nature.  There's Cypress, the winery, a horse ranch (more than one), sand dunes and the wandering desert, dinosaurs, rocks, birds, insects, good people.  And so much more.  Plants.  Flowers, trees, wheat, even weeds.  Thistle and tumbleweed and foxtails.  A photo of thistles growing along a bumper crop of wheat:

Crop by Winston Stevenson

It's a very beautiful place and I feel no matter how hard I try to capture it, to document it, to photograph it or write about it, there will always be more.  There are dozen different views just from my hammock chair.  There are always half a dozen ways to photograph the same thing: a field of wheat, an individual farm, the land, the sky, an old car in the weeds, the pasture.  I could go on forever.  The prairies are vast.

Which is, of course, what makes places in them so remote.  And it's the remoteness of the prairies that makes them so precious, the absolute absence of people.  Not many are willing to make this trip.  Not many see the point.  

People travel to see mountains or beaches or tropical forests.  But to me the most beautiful place is where I was born: in the wide open space of the Canadian prairie.  Where one has the freedom to walk in a beautiful garden, and be utterly alone, except for a friendly cat.  

Very friendly.

This is one of the world's perfect vacation spots, completely hidden from the outside.  An oasis hiding in plain sight.  Worth a plane ride, a layover, a broken bus transmission and a road trip to see.

Days without Internet

Being without the internet has gotten for me to be like being away without food or water, or sunlight.  It's that important to my existence: I rely on it for my well-being.  Without it I begin to crave and be anxious.  My mouth waters and my lips feel parched when I ponder my inability to check my email, or click on Facebook.  I lower my standards and engage in risky behaviour.  I steal unlocked wifi and use other people's phones in public.  I sneak away from functions and gatherings and click a few links, meeting up briefly with others who have crept away from the crowd for a moment.  The internet has replaced smoker culture.

It's not really the internet itself.  I can go cold off of websites I get obsessed with (comics and comedy sites that may or may not show a lot of cat pictures).  I don't mind missing news, and I never check weather anyway.  I do get irritated with not being able to check facts or investigate hunches, but it's when I can no longer write letters that I become first incredibly frustrated and then brokenhearted, and begin to wilt away tragically.  I bet I would die pining for the internet, to be able to connect.  

That's what I'm addicted to: making connections.  Continuing conversations.  Conversations which stimulate and inform, whether I'm the teacher or the one one learning from whatever is being related.    I like talking with people who are constantly learning about interesting things.   I like to carry on many conversations with many people, some of whom I love, some I barely know, some I've never even met.  Most of all I enjoy conversation with my husband.  We converse.  We make connections, we connect, we are connected.  I especially like talking with people who are entertaining and knowledgeable about many things, and my husband is an excellent example of both these things.  I love talking to him, even if just over the internet.

The internet isn't quite at the pace of actual conversation, not yet.  I like the speed of email and letters through Facebook private messages, or Google+, which is the best for picture letters.  Postcards from the internet.  I like being able to send pictures to my husband; it makes me start looking around for that which is beautiful or strange or otherwise pleasing to the eye.  Looking at things with an appraising mind, motivated by the desire to delight someone I love. 

In the absence of being able to talk, I took pictures.  Pictures of the last few days without internet.  I don't know if they will delight or not, but even if I failed to get the shot: they made me appreciate and enjoy the places I went much more than I would have if I were not taking pictures.  Having a camera in my hand made me really look, hopefully made me see.  To look around and search for beauty.  Finding it everywhere.

Being able to connect to the conversation again after being without it for four days is like shooting up heroin after a dry spell.  At least, it's like I imagine a Lou Reed song would feel if it shot up heroin.  I wonder if that means I'm addicted to my husband, because it's his conversation I crave the most when I can't have any at all.  Maybe I married him to sate my craving for good conversation.   He spends a lot of time on the internet.  Maybe he's a fellow addict.  I hope he likes the way I captured the world for him while we were apart.

The photos I took for for him in my days without internet can be seen the following posts.