Women's Empowerment Stories ...

Deck Chairs
~ Kathie Sutherland

Imagination, journaling and soul create art.

Two wooden deck chairs, white paint peeling from their backs, lounge in the pale sand of the beach. Like an old couple, they sit in silent companionship at the end of the boardwalk where overturned boats and crumbling sand castles gave way to cattails and tough grasses. They keep constant watch on the distant horizon where lumps of higher land rise from the pewter lake toward the sky. When the wind turns brisk, bits of blue open up in the gray clouds, and the sun spills diamonds onto the surface of the water. Whitecaps roll in to the shore.

For awhile, my husband and I sit silently side by side, folded into these deck chairs. We watch fishermen drifting over the water, while gulls teeter on the edge of the wind waiting for tasty tidbits of discarded fish entrails. Beneath my bare feet, I find shiny orange stones, fragile bits of freshwater shells, twists of driftwood and a grey-tipped feather. Further down the beach, scarred catamarans lie beached, their pale bellies exposed, cuddled up to rotting sailboats, with masts listing crazily.

I open my journal, and I write about an imaginary thunderstorm rolling in from the misty hills. I can almost smell sheets of rain stalking across the water, hear the wind sighing through the tops of the ancient spruce trees behind us. In my mind, rain pelts down on the canopy of leaves, mosquitoes and black flies rise out of the grass and the perfume of stinkweed, wolf willow and wild rose fills the air.

Right then, I consider living on this beach and in my journal, I pretend I have a little white house with big windows to let in the changing light. It has swaying birdfeeders hanging from the porch, a patch of beach grass at the back door, just for a spot of colour on the sand. I add a pot of daisies to welcome visitors to the front door rock garden, stack firewood under the eaves, build a hot tub and a deck where I can soak and savour the sound of water lapping at the shore. I set up my camera, take photographs of terns playing in the wind, then arrange a few pieces of driftwood at odd angles hoping a pelican will pause there for a portrait. I wander down to the water’s edge and paddle a canoe along the little bays at the edge of the forest, to the creek mouth where the water shushes in and waves roll over sandbars.

While the breakers wash in, questions flow onto the pages of my journal. I ask myself how it would feel to come to this place again on a blustery October afternoon when the rain has a bit of snow in it, when the power is out and there is no one home but me. I imagine a cold autumn wind blowing in from the north, and golden leaves letting go, flying helter-skelter along the empty road, piling in drifts at the edge of the aspen grove. I see myself with head bent and collar turned up struggling to walk in the sand, and finally, stamping my feet on the rug at the entrance to my snug little house. With a cup of hot tea beside me at my writing space by the window, I listen for blue jays squawking and sparrows chittering. I make a point of gathering with my neighbours, especially the ones with wind chimes and dreamcatchers in the window, and I offer them wine in thin glasses and we discuss books and the spiritual life.

On the beach that day, I felt soothed by the wind’s rumble, and I write in my journal that, if I could, I would spend all my holidays visiting beaches: fine white sand under a Caribbean sun; wild log-strewn beaches on Vancouver Island’s west coast where waves crash over ancient rocks. I’d spend my days exploring tidepools and let cold mist rise up and stir the dreams in me.

My word sketch of decrepit white beach chairs nearly complete, I add a wash of blue sky muted by thin clouds and just for the dramatic effect, I drape a fushia-flowered coloured scarf fluttering loose in the wind. This is a gift place from the dream maker. A place to add to the rugged mountains, the flat prairie tableland, the rich black Manitoba loam, and southern Ontario tobacco fields. Why, I wonder on the page, have I been stirred to write landscape in such a profound way?

With the morning sun warming my back, two new words appear in my journal. Word painting. I pause, considering their connotation. They speak of art and bring to mind sketches, pictures without a frame, pencil crayon drawings created by the soul. A few moments of being aware of my present surroundings manifests a home for the magical child in me. She has taken the gift of the earth, combined it with an innate eye for detail, an appreciation of the smells and sounds of my surroundings, and from that, created something entirely new. By grounding myself in the view, I become another layer in the Dream maker’s composite Wilderness, Water, Wind. I paint my perspective with a thin brush of words.

~ Kathie Sutherland

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