Sunshine and black skies

There's an exquisite kind of light that happens sometimes when you're lucky.

Had to run into town today to get a deadbolt for the bedroom door. The upstairs cat has been pushing her way into the bedroom at all hours, whereupon she takes to kneading the Farm Manager's breasts and drinking out of her water glass.

On the way back to Falling Downs we hit one of those landscapes that have your black sky all across the horizon but right in the middle of all that blackness you bask in bright sunlight. A truly wondrous moment.

It's the kind of wondrous moment I used to live for when I was an aspiring photographer. There's nothing like evening/morning light at just the right moment. Ansel Adams used to rise early day after day trying to nail it. So did I.

Now, it just happens once in awhile, and of course I've never got a camera handy. Somewhere along life's road I went from always carrying around fifty pounds of camera gear to not owning a camera.

Not that I don't own a camera. In fact, not that long ago I bought a Pentax MX body as a back-up, or perhaps a parts car, for the MX I've owned for forty years. I even picked up a couple of rolls of 35mm film so I could do a comparison test of the two camera bodies.

When camera bodies get old they leak light. Compared to what my body leaks as it gets old this is  rather benign, but it does impair the function of the camera body. I was somewhat disappointed to find that there is no readily available black and white film stock on offer any more. The clerk at the camera store told me they can "manipulate" color film to give a black and white effect.

Might as well go digital for fucks sakes.

The upstairs cat is a former barn cat, the sole survivor you might say. She hails from the era when we still had Charlie, the hound who died from cancer a couple of years ago. Well, she didn't die from cancer exactly; she died from being euthanized after being diagnosed with cancer. Of the mouth.

She wasn't even a smoker. But before she died she killed a lot of kittens. Didn't even mean to. It was just in her. Couldn't resist the urge. One minute she was giving the kitten a friendly nuzzle, next minute there'd just be a kitten tail hanging out her snout.

One option to the deadbolt would be to fix the lock on the door. The problem with this plan is that these hundred year old doors we have at Falling Downs have hundred year old locking mechanisms on them. That was an era when the entire lock-works were in a little metal box about 4 by 4 inches, which was affixed to the door, unlike later locking hardware which is internal to the door-handle itself.

I've run into this problem many times over a lifetime living in old houses. Sometimes you can fix them and sometimes you can't. Spare parts are out of the question. If you have the good fortune to have a store of surplus doors in the woodshed or the garage, sometimes you can swap in a working door lock, or even fashion a functional one from two or three that aren't.

All of these options were given a try and reluctantly discarded, hence the trip into town. When Charlie used to come into town she always rode in the back of the truck. Front paws on the side of the box and face in the wind just behind the cab. Save for one unfortunate incident when she was still a pup, she always stayed in the box.

These moron hounds we have now can't figure that out. They seem to be OK out on the road, but the moment you're in town they just can't resist the 1001 temptations. Last time I let them ride in the box, I pulled up in front of the liquor store, and godamn, if both the hounds weren't in the store before I was!

So we get this fabulous sun and black sky perfect light and for some reason it makes me think about old Tony who used to live on the Marden Road, right next to Mann's gravel pit. Later on I was to have a bit of history with the Mann brothers, but at the time I just knew their gravel pits as someplace to go off-roading.

Tony was a regular old-school working lad who put in his entire career at one of the factories in Guelph. That was in an era when working in a factory would allow a fellow of modest means and talents to send his kids to university and live in a modest home in the country. We have made so much progress in the last half century that such a thing is virtually unimaginable now, but trust me, it used to happen all the time.

So Tony has sold his house and bought a motor home, and he and the Missus are going to head out on the long-deferred adventure of a lifetime. Gonna take that Winnebago all around the continent. Spend a couple of the winter months in Panama City, then head west through the Gulf states and Texas to the Grand Canyon. Head on to the west coast and then go north. See Vancouver Island, navigate the Rocky Mountains via the Kicking Horse Pass, and gradually make their way home.

On his last day in the old place Tony had the Winnebago loaded up and gassed up. They'd had several weekends of yard sales and had put a few things in storage. All he was waiting for was the deal to close, which was going to happen any minute now. Just waiting for a call from the lawyer's office to pick up the check.

On his last trip across the Marden Road to his mailbox, Tony must have been full of anticipation. Finally, retirement! Freedom! The RV trip of a lifetime!

On his last trip back from his mailbox, Tony got run over by a gravel truck, and that was the end of all that.

The vet told us that Charlie had options. For a coupe of thousand bucks we could have her lower jaw removed. She might survive and she might not. If she did, it would of course be without a lower jaw.

In my youth I would have dispatched an ailing pet myself, but I don't have that in me anymore. Charlie and I took that last trip to the vet clinic with her in the back, paws up on the side of the box, head out in the wind.

I drove home alone under one of those crazy black skies with sunshine streaming right through the middle of it.