My crafty side was squashed by the Home Ec teachers in my high school with their straight lines and fussy 5/8″ seam allowances. I allowed my fondness for writing stories to be extinguished by my English teachers with their straight margins and fussy McLean method capital letters. My eagerness to draw pretty pictures in a Picasso meets Rembrandt kind of style had been destroyed by Bird Legs Carter in grade seven double art, many years earlier. My teenage years were a monumental achievement of mediocrity and failure..

Aren’t we all so glad that those years mean nothing to our success and happiness as adults. I honestly don’t know how it all would have turned out for me if I hadn’t met E at twenty-two..

So here I arrived, nigh on fifty-eight years old, a talentless hack on a BC west coast gulf island.                  Surrounded by the cliché off grid talented artsy crafty do it your selfers….  and they don’t laugh at me when I show them my mistake on the quilt seam… as it turns out .. they have them too.. mistakes!!!  who knew??  and yet they continue to create for the love of creating… Projects don’t have to be perfect. All these years I never sewed a dress, or knit a toque because I thought I couldn’t produce a perfect product… Now my hands and arms fail me, and I wish I hadn’t wasted all of that time worrying, or knowing that what I might create would be flawed……

Today, was what we living here on the island know as… a perfect day. An example of why we chose to hump propane up the dock, skimp on our showers and dine in the candle light….We do it for the reward… A conversation in the garden with a good friend, a spontaneous romp on the water photographing whales finished with a dinner visiting family, is the pay cheque at the end of the month of hard work….

So I give to you a snap shot of our afternoon and I thank the powers that be that I was able to survive my misspent youth and live a life that everyone deserves.. One filled with support, love and a  never-ending

awe in nature