Spring sensations welcome at Birch Hollow
Still writing here in Gravenhurst.....with just a few words left to spare
Strangely this has been an incredibly prolific period in my senior years as a writer. I can’t believe I can still sit for four and five hours at this keyboard without collapsing into a great heap of expired authordom. While in some areas I’ve been penning much less, in others I’ve been pumping out copy like I did my first years as editor of the former Herald-Gazette, in Bracebridge, back in the early 1980's. Then I was driven by a passion for expression and the weekly gain of readership.....fueled by raw enthusiasm and beer. Lots and lots of beer. My young writing days almost killed me.....many times. The more I drank the more I wrote. The more I wrote while drinking.....the less I could salvage when I went to edit the copy later. I would be lucky to get one decent paragraph. I used to hold off on the booze until the writing was done. I can’t watch the movie, "Lost Weekend," without feeling it was my biography. The good news is that I can’t afford to drink any more and I’m getting a much better feeling.....a pretty fair high, just enjoying the fact I can still compose a well received column these days minus the fuel.
This past winter was spent getting the bulk of my paranormal stories on line, in my Muskoka Ghosts blog, including a long series of columns on the mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of Canadian landscape painter, Tom Thomson, back in July of 1917, while on a canoe traverse of Algonquin Park’s Canoe Lake.
I have been writing many columns ahead on a new series of antique and collectable themed columns for Curious; The Tourist Guide (available locally). These are all biographical accounts of a lengthy career as a treasure hunter. I’ve been hunting antiques and interesting stuff since I was about five years old, and gathering assorted stuff while on my way to school at Lakeshore Public School in Burlington. By time I got home each night I had my pockets jammed to over-flowing, and arm-fulls of old auto parts I found on the road, broken hockey sticks, dozens of chestnuts gathered on the hillside of Torrance Avenue, and anything else that was shiny and would attract the attention of a racoon. My poor mother Merle never knew what was coming home in those topped-up pockets and hidden in my bulging coat. She used to cull the items in my room once a month or I would have filled every open space by year’s end. I’m still doing this at 53 years of age so you can imagine how much patience my wife possesses, to put up with the calamity of road trips and ceremonious returns with van loads of treasure.....some purchased, some found, some given for the asking, some retrieved from the sidewalks beneath the sign that reads.... "Free to Good Home." I figured it was time this year to begin a biographical work for my kids because they’ve never really appreciated that there was a method to my madness. I began writing a memoir of a crazy collector and it went from an old ledger book where I was making notes to the pages of Curious; The Tourist Guide, which reaches about 40,000 readers a month. Not bad for a few anecdotes about collecting excesses over the years. If you can’t poke fun at yourself.....life’s too bloody serious.
All this writing stuff has been happening here at our mid-town, residential cabin we call Birch Hollow, and once again I must say it has been a most wonderful, calming sojourn in this magnificent Muskoka. As I have noted before, I was concerned when we moved to Gravenhurst back in the late 1980's because for a time, my writing wasn’t generating with the same vigor as in other abodes, particularly in Bracebridge and Windermere. Writers need a safe and inspiring haven. After about a year of plucking about at the typewriter I gradually found The Bog across the road, and the sea of lilacs and raspberry canes outside my window, were the generous treats of semi-solitude, and ever since spring has always set me free....... No danger of running out of things to write about. And I’m not disappointed this year either. It’s been one of those second-wind kind of situations, and it would be wrong not to express my gratitude to my hometown here for kindnesses bestowed an old writer. I might not have much praise for local politicians, but then they’re used to it, and urban sprawl which I despise, but by golly, I do love the setting here at my Gravenhurst retreat.