The Quiet Country Life

I spent most of the day yesterday in my quilt workshop working on this quilt piece which is now finished.  The activity conjures up such a pretty picture, I think: the quilter working calmly and purposefully with her needle and thread, hour after hour on a quiet, country, summer afternoon, to produce a homely item that she or he or child or friend can toss over him/herself on a cool fall afternoon while lying on the couch lookiing out the window at the fall leaves or reading a much-beloved 19th Century novel.  (I'm not sure there are any 'much beloved' 20th Century novels, other than among the genre of children's books.)  The quilt surely will be filled with that calmness and steadiness.

So pretty to think of it so.  But in fact, by choosing to spend so much time in my workshop yesterday, I was giving myself the opportunity not only to get this quilt finished, but also the opportunity to listen to my neighbors' workpeople attach a new roof to their house.  Well, it's noisy, but it's a limited time issue, and it has to be done, and better to do it (I guess) in the sun than in the rain, although the temperature in this sun on a roof must be highly debilitating or at least dehydrating.  So that's all right.  But accompanying the hammers were the steady barks of the neighbor dogs.  Were I to walk out on my porch, absolute barking hysteria erupted.  Were anyone to come by, or to walk by, or to bike by, all the same.  And after a spell of barking, the dogs are joined by their owner, who yells into the summer afternoon at them to stop, which they do not.

Eventually, they go inside and quiet returns, but by then, I have left the workshop and am somewhere where I can't hear them quite as well anyway.  But there you have it, a quilt made not with quiet and calmness, but one that includes, at least in the final hours, constant noise from without and irateness from within.  Somehow, I think that calling the law to report excessive barking of dogs is not going to turn out well if the law is the owner of the dogs.  I'm thinking of investing in a voice activated recorder.  Then I will make a 24-hour recording of one of those days when the dogs go at it unrelentingly.  Then I will submit it to a notary to document its authenticity.  And then I will send the tapes anonymously with the notary's sealed paper to the higher law.  Or maybe it's time to deal with a journalist who has a shield for the anonymous source.  Nudge, nudge; wink, wink.

Or maybe not.  This afternoon, I am reading Alain De Botton's The Consolations of Philosophy, and, as it happens, after lunch I started on his chapter on the Stoics.  This is Seneca's advice, via De Botton, about being in the vicinity of excessive noise: "To calm us down in noisy streets, we should trust that those making a noise know nothing of us. . . .  We should not import into scenarios where they don't belong pessimistic interpretations of others' motives.  Thereafter, noise will never be pleasant, but it will not have to make us furious." (Ital. added)  Well, I didn't think that the dogs' owner was tolerating the noise in order to drive me crazy, but rather was tolerating the noise because he didn't care whether I was driven crazy or because he didn't notice that it was a crazy-making noise.  However, I recognized Seneca's advice as well advised: "All outdoors may be bedlam, provided that there is no disturbance within."  So, I hope the guy will work with his dogs to quiet them down, and in the meanwhile, I'll work with my within to reduce disturbance.

Rural Renewal, Part II

There are a lot of trailers in Point Roberts.  There used to be 3 trailer parks; now there are only two, I think, as Whalen's closed down a year or so ago.  But there are lots of lone trailers behind houses, and lots of mobile home trailers that are permanently grounded on a lot: that are more like houses than trailers in their function.  A lot of them are not lived in or are seldom lived in and are a lot more like abandoned houses than they are like anything else.  Because they are mobile home trailers, they are built to move around the rounds, even if they are not doing it, more than sitting unattended in a damp, cold climate.

When I was making the abandoned house quilts, I had a number of trailers to choose from, but I picked the one at the corner of APA and South Beach, because it was so available to public view and because it seemed quite typical of all the other abandoned trailers I'd seen around on my walks.

Here's what it looked like the first time I saw it, in 2003. 

It was probably around February when I took this picture.  Ivy was growing up into the house; there was no sign that anybody was living there.  I took pictures through the windows of the front door and it looked like an earthquake had shaken all the contents around.






I completed the trailer quilt later in the year, but only after I had rephotographed it some time during the summer, when it was of a sudden draped with tarps, and I combined the winter/spring pictures for that quilt.

I have continued to photograph this trailer over the years.  It gets attended to; it gets abandoned all over again.  It's covered with tarps, and then they're all gone and a little table and chair are set outside; it gets a coat of paint, and then the grey runs return..  And the cycle repeats.  Thus, this trailer, the trailer representative for the Point, is a little more problematic in its renewal.  Unlike the APA house from the last post, the trailer mostly gets cosmetic improvements, and then it slides back into abandonment.

Here it is this past week, 8 years after the original picture: its tarps are all gone again; its paint is looking pretty good, the leaves are raked off the yard and it almost looks as if the grass may have been mowed.  Even more important, it now has a little car parking area with fresh bark chips marked out in front.  It's Its apple tree is blooming, because apple trees, all over the Point, continue to bud and bloom and fruit whether anyone cares for them or not.  That's one of the differences between houses and apple trees.

Rural Renewal: Act I

Here is a picture of the historic farmhouse on APA Road.  This picture was taken in 2008.  The first picture I took of this house was back in maybe 2003, before I had a digital camera.  The house looked very worn out at the time, but not so derelict as it did in 2008.  The house sits in the center of a large, undeveloped, untenanted parcel of land, several acres of it.  It used to be a farm, but not in my 15-year-old memory, of course.  It has never been tenanted in my memory.  It is just another of the many abandoned houses here on the Point that struggle along and alone until someone stops their struggle by tearing them down.

Early in the 2000's, I made 16 or so quilts based upon the abandoned houses of Point Roberts.  By 2010, the quilts remain, but at least half of the houses that brought the quilts into existence have permanently exited this world.  The abandoned houses that remain are mostly getting worse, what with rain and cold and wind and time making their inexorable inroads. 

This is the quilt that memorialized the APA Road farmhouse in 2004. Back in 2004, plywood covered some of the windows, but not all of them.  By 2008, most of the plywood was gone.

And this is the APA Road farmhouse in 2010.  It is heading to restoration, not degradation, and not disappearance.  It is a bright, bright sign in our landscape.  And when Lorne is done with it, I'll make another quilt of it for him, to thank him for what he has done.

Library Infamy

I am a big library fan, have been ever since I learned to read in the very early 40’s in Pocatello, Idaho. In those days, lots of people (including my family) had few books in their houses because books were yet a luxury item. (And by few, I mean literally two or three books: a Bible, a dictionary, and a cookbook or two.) Once I learned to read, I also learned that I could overcome that limitation because the library brought me a whole world of books.

And thus it was that of a summer Monday morning, the 5-year-old me walked down to the local library in that small town to find three books—the most the library would let me check out--in the children’s library. This tiny, two-room library was in the basement of the real library, which (adults only admission) featured three big rooms and many more books. Once I had checked out my three books, I went back home as fast as I could and got to reading. My plan was to get these three read before the library closed and return them to the library in order to get new ones for the evening. At that age, the books I fancied were short ones, so by 3 o’clock, I was back at the library ready to carry out my plan, whose purpose was to ensure that I was never without a freshly unread book.

Upon arriving at the library, however, I was informed by the somewhat disapproving children’s librarian that the library did not allow me to check out and return books on the same day because I couldn’t possibly have read them all already. The library required me to keep those books out at least until the next day. Which I did, returning the next morning for more. But now fully aware of the possibility of crossing the library’s wants and needs, indeed of disappointing the library.

That is my first memory of coming a cropper at the public library. But it is not my last such memory. When I was ten, I received a special dispensation from the head librarian to be allowed to check books out of the upstairs, big, adult library. The books were more numerous and much longer and by then I was inclined to reread a book as soon as I had finished it. So instead of getting books back too quickly, I found myself bringing them back not quickly enough.

One day, my mother greeted me with the unhappy information that she had been at the library and found my name in the posted list on the wall at the main desk. The list was the names of those who were not loved by the lord nor the library because they had too many overdue books. And there I was: a child who had brought shame upon herself and her family and whose shame was recognized and broadcast by The Library itself. For many months, I could scarcely bring myself to go up those library steps for fear of finding some new way in which I had disappointed The Library.

I write about this because this past Tuesday, I saw both my name and my face again on the wall of a public library, along with the names and faces of the other members of the quilt group here in Point Roberts. This was on the occasion of the Point Roberts Library receiving the quilt we had made for it. The reception was wonderfully attended, with perhaps fifty people there in addition to a dozen of us quilters. There were gifts and cakes and tea and coffee and a lovely presentation speech by Lucy Williams, and much taking of photographs.

A problem with having public events in a library is, of course, that the books take up too much space. So it was crowded; nevertheless, we were all mighty pleased to be in that situation. I was also, however, sorry that my mother--dead almost a decade,--would not know that at last I had managed to get my name on a library wall under honorable circumstances.

The reception also honored Kris Lomedico’s 25th anniversary at the library. If I know anything about Kris as a librarian, it is that she would never have told me I couldn’t return books the same day I took them out. In fact, she would probably have stopped what she was doing and helped me pick out three more for the evening’s read.

Looking at Art

The New York Times published an article the other day about how people look at art. Which might more appropriately say, how they don’t look at art. Over the years, and particularly at quilt shows, I’ve noticed that people (as The Times reports) kind of move quickly by, unsure about what, exactly, they are seeing or how to respond to it. If they are looking at traditional bed quilts, they get a quick ‘like/don’t like’ message from and to themselves, and then move right on, knowing that, somehow or another, that quilt has a destiny on a mattress. End of story.

If they’re looking at what is less craft (useful) and more art (not so clearly useful, or not useful at all), they usually don’t even get the quick message. It’s more as if their eyes, as their feet quickly move by, are looking to see if they ‘recognize’ the piece; looking to see if it is similar to something else they know, as if their job was to categorize it, the way you might categorize people at a party mostly attended by people you’ve never laid eyes on (A friend? An acquaintance? A stranger? The host/hostess?). And most of those art pieces are strangers, and people have no more reason to look at them closely, to engage with them, than they have to start up a conversation with the people whom they happen to see when they are riding on a bus.

So I went to spend my day at the Point Roberts Art Walk Quilt Show on Monday with some trepidation. We had put up a lot of quilts, a number of them mine, and I was going to be sitting in the same room with them, watching people walk past them at that steady pace reserved for the foreign object. It didn’t help that I read The Times article the night before the Art Walk.

But, as occasionally happens, reality proves journalism wrong. A lot of people came to see the quilts and a lot of them stopped, stood, and talked to one another about what they were seeing. One quilt (mine) with a lot of humorous text and cartoon-like pictures almost always had somebody in front of it, somebody laughing, which would only be possible if they stopped long enough to read and relate the images to the words. Others, looking at other pieces, were clearly captured by color, form, image: something that made them pause a minute, or even five minutes to see, actually see what was in front of them without worrying about whether they liked it or didn’t like it, recognized it or not, could categorize it or not. And with surprising frequency, they sought out the maker, inquiring about why the piece was as it was.

It is hard to look at something if you don’t know why you are doing it. It perhaps says a lot about the kind of people who live here in this remarkable peninsular exclave, that so many of them were not just moving through fast but were instead looking, seeing, responding, and asking for more. Speaking on behalf of all the quilt group members, it certainly made our day. The Times article was about people visiting the Louvre; maybe we should invite The Times' writer up here next year.

Library Daze

Here is the quilt that the Point Roberts Quilt Group just finished for the Point Roberts Library. We got it up on the wall this week and it seems already to look as if it had always been there. This is of course the second quilt we have hanging in the Community Center and we have in process a second one for the Library.

This library quilt was sort of a long time arriving, partly because it's a very big (wide--almost 10 feet) and heavy piece. The quilt group, which includes about 12 people, is remarkably stable given that people come and go, as they often do here on the Point, for longish periods of time. Folks will be away for the winter or the spring or the summer or, in my case, half of every month, but still we manage to get together every month and keep at one project or another. Our biggest project, perhaps, was the four 'Seasons of Point Roberts' quilts that hang in the great hall of the Lutheran Church.

The Library’s Kris asked us almost 2 years ago, I’d guess, whether we’d be willing to make one or two quilts for the library walls. We said ‘Yes!’ quickly and started in the planning. The 'Four Seasons' quilts and the 'Community Quilt' all involved creating landscapes, and the other quilts we've done for the community were somewhat traditional (the ‘Boat Quilt’, which hangs in the hallway at the Wellness Clinic, or the ‘Lighthouse Quilt’ that used to hang at the Roof House, or the Bird Quilt, which I think is hanging at the local primary school). In this case, we jumped off in an entirely new direction by agreeing to have each of us make a self-portrait with our favorite book. I was pretty much the only group member who’d worked with portraits of that size (18”x24”) and it proved to be more of a problem to fill all that space than people had anticipated.

So we ended up with six quilted self-portraits, each with one (or more) favorite book, and six similarly-sized bookcase blocks that included smaller photographs of other members who had either worked on the quilt or worked on previous group quilts that we had completed. Some of the portraits involve printing photographs on fabric, one of the things that ink jet printers are very good at.

It’s certainly a self-referential piece, a kind of Advertisements for Ourselves, I guess, with all of us grinning--or at least staring--out at the Library visitors and patrons for years to come. But there we are, members of the community who have actually done something for the community, I think. Today, a few of us from the Quilt Group spent the morning, at the request of the Library staff, providing a summer craft program for local kids. A dozen or so kids and their parents came and everyone appeared to be having a very good time making little collage books out of fabric. (One little girl titled her book “I Like Everything.” ) It was a very low key, but very pleasing way to spend a couple of hours. And it reminded me of a funny conversation I had about 18 months ago with a member of a local poker group. The question was whether the Quilt Group was a ‘community group’ or a ‘hobby group.’ His claim was that it was no more a community group than was his poker club. But it occurred to me today that nobody has asked the poker club to come teach the local kids to gamble, or even to play cards.

There will be a reception-like event for “My Favorite Book” in early August. Come and meet us. Better yet, come and meet the quilt.

All About Me

This past week has pretty much been totally devoted to getting this 'featured artist' quilt show exhibit up and running. The Sunshine Coast Quilt Guild has been around for many years and currently has maybe 150 members. I’ve belonged to it for about 14 years and most of the people I know on the Coast I met through the quilt groups so doing an exhibit with and for that show is like playing for the home crowd. On the other hand, these are people who have watched my work over the years so they’re not easy to impress. Of course, most of the people who come to the show are not quilters, but people who like to see quilts and don’t need to be wooed. My job this week is to get my quilts up and then to spend a few hours each day keeping them company and talking to people who come through.

The space for my exhibit turned out to be different from what the planners had expected and totally adequate. This part of the show (there are two venues, one in downtown Sechelt and one a few miles north), is in a big Catholic church hall, and includes about 80 quilts plus my twelve. The other venue is smaller, and includes another 40 or so quilts plus a group of wearable art jackets.

Hanging my quilts turned out to be very problematic and if Ed had not been there to help me, I think I would have just turned around with my quilts and gone home. But he was there and he did hang them, although it took him 4 hours to do it. The space is open, about 20 feet long on the back side, and ten feet each at the two ends. There are five quilts along the long wall (the ‘autobiographical quilts’) and two political ones at one end and five more at the other. In the middle, there’s a small table where I preside or something while I’m there.

I’m not entirely comfortable talking to strangers, but there are enough old friends and acquaintances who come by as well, that my anxieties are kept at a reasonable level. Mostly, people are taken by the humor of the pieces which they don’t expect in quilts. Most people make the effort to say something to me, if only to say that they like the pieces or that they admire the effort required for such work, and many want to know what compelled me to make them. Indeed, more want to know that than want to know how I achieve particular effects, which was a little surprising because quilters are often most interested in technical matters.

The quilts like all being together, I think, because it rarely happens: I don't, alas, live in a house with museum-type wall space. I’m happy because I like to see them all together. It’s like having all one’s children home at the same time: a lot of work, but very good for the soul. All in all, a happy three days so far, and I expect tomorrow to be more of the same. We are all pleased, I think!

Individual photos of the quilts in this exhibit can be seen here.

Cherry Tree Lane

Today seemed on the verge of being the first day of spring so I took a walk down APA Road (named for the Alaska Packers Association cannery) to visit the cherry trees on Cherry Tree Lane. That’s my own name for something which has no name and almost has no existence. I first saw them maybe ten or twelve springs ago…a half dozen cherry trees, neatly lined up on each side of a narrow pathway on the north side of APA. The pathway led, precisely, to nowhere. And yet, I knew it must have once led to somewhere. There must have been a house to which those trees invited friends to come in for a cup of whatever. There must have been kids who walked up that little lane after a day in school. This abandoned house had been for a long time, apparently, more than abandoned: absolutely disappeared, with no sign of the house’s previous placement even.

During most of the year, you’d barely notice the trees, but in April (or sometimes March) when the fruit trees begin to bud out, these six trees spring into bloom. And so they are beginning to do this week. The picture above is from the first time I ever saw them.

In the intervening years, I made a quilt from the picture and added those children I was sure had been there. And in the intervening years, someone came and bought the land and added a new big driveway twenty feet or so from the cherry trees. The driveway, in the nature of driveways, travels a goodly distance back to a modern house that in no way resembles the kind of house that was once there. You know that, even if you have never seen that original house. The cherry trees now looked strangely dwarfed by the new driveway, but in spring, this week, if you stand right in front of them, all the changes wash away, and they are there as they were back maybe 50 years ago. And even farther, when a neighbor (Mrs. Gudmanson?) brought the tree starts over.

For me, because I live in this part of Point Roberts, Cherry Tree Lane is one of the most memorable parts of this small peninsula. Whoever planted them can hardly have imagined they would still be here in the 21st century, still capturing our hearts and imaginations! Our gratitude goes to the new owners who were gracious enough, knowing enough, to leave them where they were in the trees' declining years.

The Way They Built Then

Here is the Hansen/Johnson house. It is probably the first or second best-known of all the abandoned houses in Point Roberts. It is located immediately across from the post office on Gulf Road, When I first went into it in 2002, I walked around the various rooms, which were very clean, very tidy, but a tad exposed to the elements on the south side underneath that vigorous vine you see growing on the right hand side of the house. The main room was wallpapered with cream colored paper with a fairly large floral print in oranges and beiges and greens. I could hardly imagine living with such wallpaper day and night, week after week, except for the fact that I remembered such wallpaper from houses when I was a kid, 60+ years ago. We liked it then.

The house is very sturdy and I was told that the walls themselves were built of reclaimed crab traps, wood long soaked in the ocean. And the house is, indeed, still very true. There are some things about it that puzzle me: e.g., it does not face Gulf Road. You would think it would, but it faces its own driveway, which comes off Gulf Road up the front door. Also, it has a very small skylight. Surely not something originally part of the house, but so small that it is hard to imagine that it would provide much in the way of light.

When we left the house the day we visited it, I picked up a piece of wallpaper that was lying on the floor and put it in the back seat of my car. I rode around with it in the car for several months, with the sun shining on it and drying it up and curling it up. Then I realized that the wallpaper piece was a vital part of the quilt I was making and I was obliged to resuscitate it with moisture and weights. And it flattened out well because it’s much thicker wallpaper than they make nowadays, I’d guess.

The first picture of the house comes from early in the spring of 2002; the second picture is the house in December, 2008. It has changed relatively little in those intervening 6 years. By contrast, some of the abandoned houses, less well constructed, have fallen apart in six years. Mr. Hansen, Mr. Johnson, whoever you were, good job!

The quilt depicting the Hansen/Johnson house is currently displayed on the wall of the waiting room at the Aydon Wellness Clinic in Point Roberts. It is 30”x37”, and is framed with wood reclaimed from the fence in my yard. The piece of original wallpaper lies underneath/behind the quilted house.

APA Road House

The abandoned house on the tract of land off APA is one of the three ‘big’ abandoned houses on the Point: ‘big’ in the sense of well-known, because everybody sees them regularly, because they are on the main roads. They are all three what I think of as original houses, which is to say houses that the Icelandic settlers who came here from Vancouver Island would have known, would still recognize if they were to return, even though all three have long been without tenants.

If Point Roberts was seriously into the history business, they would be ‘historic houses,’ and at least one of them would have been restored and tourists would come and walk through the rooms to see how the fishermen and farmers and their wives lived here a hundred years ago. As it is, despite the good and steady work of the P.R. Historical Society to keep the Point’s history before our eyes, the houses are just an owner away (and maybe less) from being razed.

Within the past ten years, they were charged with being eyesores and dangerous structures, but most of them survived that kerfuffle. Nevertheless, they are still somewhat susceptible to wind and weather damage. Fortunately, they are very well made houses, sturdy lumber that endures even without an owner’s care, perhaps because of the nature of their construction. I have been told by various people that much of the wood used in these original houses came from fish traps, meaning the wood would have been well-seasoned in the ocean before it came to hold up the houses.

But no quality of wood, no aesthetic or historic value stands in the way of those who are indifferent to the houses’ value in comparison to a desire to build a bigger, fancier, up-to-the-minute house on these beautiful great lots. It is a different kind of beauty than Lily Point, of course, but I find it no less beautiful because it is grassland rather than tree land, no less worthy of being preserved. These are the sites of the farms that fed more than lived here. These are the sites of apple orchards whose variety name is no longer known. They are, in a sense, abandoned; but in another sense, they are vibrantly with us, filled with what they were, as seen through
what they are in the process of becoming.


The first time I saw the APA Road house, it looked like this picture. I couldn’t actually get right up to the house because it was surrounded by closely growing brambles. But it stood very straight; none of the sloping roofs or sagging window frames I’ve seen on the newer abandoned houses. It’s been about six years since I took that picture.


Last month, I took this picture. I think the property must have been bought in the past year or so because the grasses have all been cut back, making the house more accessible and making it easier for strangers to assist in its decline. The cutting of the fields around the house also makes the house look exposed, frailer, more accepting of the razing that is bound to be in its future.



The quilt of the house is 42”x34” and was completed in 2003. The day I finished it, I was driving down APA Road (incidentally, APA stands for Alaska Packers’ Association, the owners of the cannery that was in P.R.) and glanced out the car window at the house as I went by. There, in exactly what would be the lower left corner of the quilt, was a coyote, almost invisible against the tall grasses and bushes. I turned right around and went home to see if I could incorporate him into the quilt, but it was too late. And now, we rarely see coyotes. When I see the house nowadays, with its ‘KEEP OUT’ sign and chain next to the road, I feel strongly that it may be too late for it, too.

Quiet Night

The presents are opened, the turkey is cooked and eaten, the walnut rocca is made and half consumed, the snow is beginning its retreat--with an overnight icing interval--and the sky is black and star-studded. Another Christmas done gone, oh, lordy, another Christmas done gone.

And tomorrow brings us Canada's shopping mania day, Boxing Day, when all the stores put everything they still have left on sale. I've never gone out to see this phenomenon, but maybe tomorrow is the day to try it on! Good wishes to all for the rest of the year.

Half-Way Through

That is, to next Mid-Summer’s Night, to the Summer Solstice. That’s my idea of Christmas Dreaming. Well the storm roared into Seattle, according to my news sources, but not into the Sunshine Coast. When I quit last night at 11 p.m., it wasn’t snowing and we certainly were not having the promised ‘howling winds.’ This morning around 10 a.m., it did start snowing again and has continued throughout the day, but it is just an ordinary kind of snow storm. Two years ago, we had one like this and the photographic documentation of the 2006 and the 2008 storms are pretty much interchangeable.



The quilt, in between, is of the 2006 storm. No need to repeat making it.

So our power is still on and we can no more get out of the driveway today than we could yesterday. So, I’d say that today is Status Quo.

update: a phone call from a P.R. correspondent brings the news that the Point has about 4 more inches of snow, but has not had terrible wind. Good news, that!

Mr. Boyd's Girlfriend's House

This is what I call The Covered House, but is perhaps more aptly called Mr. Boyd’s Girlfriend’s House. After I found Mr. Boyd’s house and photographed it, people on the Point told me that there was another abandoned house on Rex Road. I went back but couldn’t find it. So they described it for me more carefully. ‘It’s right after you turn onto Rex Road.’ If it were this week, they could say, ‘It’s right across from that snowman in an inflatable globe.’ Then I would have found it maybe, but back in 2001, I definitely didn’t.

Time passed and yet someone else would tell me about the second abandoned house on Rex Road and occasionally I’d drive by but see nothing. Then, I drove by in 2003 in the winter and saw it. Covered in spring and summer by the luxurious growth, it was visible (and even then just barely) only when the leaves began to shrivel or disappear from the abundant brambles. It was like finding Sleeping Beauty’s castle. The house was right where people had told me it was: on the south side, just after you turn onto Rex Road from Marine Drive. In fact, it is only about 20 feet from the road.

So I produced the wall quilt, ‘The Covered House,’ and went on to looking for other abandoned houses, although I continued to visit all the already-found houses on occasion and rephotograph them. The Covered House in summer was as splendid as the covered house in fall, now that I knew where to look for it. Its only visibly recognizable part was one stone chimney.



Then, one day in 2005, I took one of my grandchildren who had seen the quilt to see the house. To my very great surprise, the brambles had been cut back and the entrance to the house was now not only visible but accessible. We poked around a bit, even got a little inside to take some additional pictures of the chaos that was clearly visible: furniture tossed round, shelves fallen over. For the first time, I understood that it was a log house with two fireplaces, pretty much in the same style as Mr. Boyd’s house.


When we were about to leave, a man from the house across the street (the snowman globe owner, I guess) came out and asked what we were doing. I explained who I was and what I was doing and he told me that awhile back he had seen some people coming around and photographing the house. For some reason (he knew Mr. Boyd, perhaps), he felt some obligation toward the house. I think he thought the photographers might be from the county or some kind of agency that would cause the owner grief, so he cut back the brambles so the house would look better. Of course, it now made it a real attractive nuisance: with the brambles, you could barely see it and you certainly couldn’t get into it; with the brambles cut back, anybody could go inside and that was one falling down house. Pretty dangerous, I would have said, but I have zero risk tolerance.


I return now and then to the house. The neighbor has let it go back to its natural state, perhaps understanding that it is only me visiting occasionally, taking yet another picture. This is the photo from last week, before winter came. It’s looking more decrepit, but more decently covered. It’s falling apart, but it hasn’t fallen down.

The story I got from the neighbor was that Mr. Boyd built the house for his girlfriend, but that when the relationship fell apart, she left Point Roberts. He then closed the house and never again went near it. The neighbor is the one who told me that the current owner is Mr. Boyd’s nephew, who lives in Vancouver. All hearsay, of course.

A Visit to a Former House

Cold and snowy today, which transforms the landscape. Last Thursday, though, it was still fall, and I drove around to check up on some of the abandoned houses. I almost always start the circuit with the Boyd House, which is located at the end of Rex Road, were Mark St. crosses it. Well, that is to say that is where the house would be if the house were still there. But it’s been gone for about six years.

Back around 2000, when I first started tracking these houses, the Boyd house was the first one I ever saw AND also was able to go inside of. It was pretty scary, because even then, it was falling down. The roof had a great sag to it and big holes where the cedars shakes had decayed out; the walls had large openings; the floors were pretty hit and miss; the windows all broken out. But it was an interesting house. It was a small log house and the walls had many 4-6 foot paintings of Inuit totem animals. The fireplace looked like you still might be able to use it. There was nothing inside the house; i.e., no furniture or long-abandoned boxes of mouldy books (both of which turn out to be pretty common in these houses).

I took lots of pictures of it, and within a month or so had completed a small wall quilt memorializing it.







It wasn’t surprising that within a year or so it had collapsed under the force of snow and the winter’s customary big winds. And it lay all about on the ground for awhile.



One day in 2005 when I went to see it, the collapsed house had been disappeared. Instead, the land was covered with trailers. I couldn’t tell what was going on and I knew no one on the street to ask, so I just photographed and moved on.




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This week, the trailers are gone and, next door to the former Boyd house, a large new house with an elaborate garden has arisen. And the Boyd house, which appeared to be gone in the photo from 2005, now appears to be stacked neatly on the ground in various piles: logs here, stones there, foundation where I last left it.




I know a little about the house, or at least I have been told a little by various people who purport to speak with authority but I have no way of knowing what is true. Mr. Boyd, I am told, was a hippy who came here in the 1960’s and built this log house to live in. He was eccentric, even for a hippy, and did not have plumbing in the house. He would visit neighbors periodically and ask whether he could use their bathrooms to take a brief shower. Within the house, there were areas cut out in the floor down to the ground so that local small animals (raccoons, in particular) could visit the house. Mr. Boyd also had a girlfriend here in Point Roberts, but that’s part of the story of another abandoned house. At some point before I moved here, he died. And the property is said to belong now to a relative in Vancouver. But maybe none of that is true. Maybe the true story is yet out there to be gathered.

Fall Events

Even though summer is over and we’re finished with tourist events, Saturday was an at-least 2-event day here on Point Roberts. Probably more events than that, but at least two that all the people were invited to attend. First, at 1 p.m., was the Obama Rally at the Community Center. I needed to go pick up a book at the library and get an envelope in the Saturday mail, so went off to attend at noon, unfortunately, having confused the time. On my way, I saw leaf piles burning here and there, smoke drifting through the air, reminding us all that fall is here—which the recent warm weather has belied--and that others are not committed to saving their leaves for compost. Arriving at the Community Center at 12:15, I took note that no one was attending the rally.

By the time I realized that I was early (not late), I had run out of time and thus left before the rally started. I talked later to someone who said that it was thinly attended, but if a city the size of Salt Lake could drum up only 1,000 people for a rally, how many people would you get in Point Roberts where there are maybe 800 voters (of whom perhaps one-third will vote for Bob Barr)? About 1.3? There were, at least, more than that: another friend drove by at 3 p.m. and reported to me that there were 16 cars in the parking lot at that time, although some of them would be people going to the library. Bumper stickers were available, I was also told.

I don’t know; my idea of a rally is when you go out and yell, ‘Hell no, we won’t go!’ or ‘Down with the plutocrats!’ or something like that. My sense of rallies (too much sixties, I suppose) is that their purpose is to show opposition to someone/thing who seems to have a lot more power than you do and joining together gives you the (momentary) illusion that you just might be in charge of things. I don’t really think there’s a giant McCain majority out there, working to oppress us, given the massive opposition to the current administration and the lack of difference between it and the McCainites.

The second event was the Art Opening at the Blue Heron. The Blue Heron is a long-standing art and craft gallery, run by Kitty and Paul Doyle. Both residents and visitors shop there and many of the items are made by local artisans and artists. Each month, a different local artist is featured, and yesterday was the opening of a new show of fiber art. It’s a tiny little gallery, so work has to be fairly small to be shown, but each month something new and interesting is on display—painting, jewelry, glass work, photography, weaving, wall quilts, ceramics, etc.—and I go to celebrate its arrival. The quality of the work is very high. Also, in addition to the show, there are drinks and desserts. Nice way to wrap up a windy Saturday. Photos of the current exhibit (Artist: Joyce Wensley) are here.

Spoils for Our Elders

An acquaintance and fellow blogger down in Santa Fe, New Mexico, posted a story the other day about age, mortality and the shedding of belongings. It seems that an 80-year-old friend of the blogger had had a mild heart attack, and that this brush with mortality had loosened his hold on his belongings. A box of treasured opera CD’s arrived by mail to the blogger, a gift that seemed to offer some kind of continuity to the giver. The puzzling part was that the blogger himself is 85-years-old and had several years ago suffered some very serious cardiac problems. Now, the 85-year-old has even more of things he needs to get rid of, while the 80-year-old has somewhat fewer.

I think once one hits one’s 70’s, the awareness of how many things one has and the question of what is eventually going to happen to the more treasured of those things (not IF but WHEN one dies) presses more quite sharply. Because I’ve moved around so much, all my life, I have (happily, I think) ended up with nothing from my ancestral life other than a couple of photo albums, and my mother’s christening dress. When I lived in New England, I was amazed at all the houses that were chock full of ancestral belongings. What a weight of the past was there. And, I suppose, the refusal to have that ‘weight of the past’ is much of what the western U.S. has always stood for.

Earlier this year, I sent a box of doll furniture that I made in the 1970’s to a granddaughter, but other than that, I haven’t actually done anything to start this needed (or perhaps unneeded?) dispersal of treasured things. Treasured by me, of course, but not necessarily treasured by anyone who is on the recipient end. Mostly, at the moment, I’m focusing on the ‘finishing unfinished things’ part of the spectrum. Knitting includes unfinished pairs of sox, hats, shawls, sweaters; quilting includes blocks that haven’t yet been made into quilt tops, quilt tops that haven’t yet been made into finished quilts, and no end of pieces in various stages that would someday be an art quilt/wall quilt if I refined my ideas about them sufficiently to progress to that stage. Lots of embroidery work also sitting around in a nearly finished stage.

Only yesterday, though, I actually finished the quilting on a ‘cathedral windows’ quilt that I started 25 years ago. I began that quilt so long ago that I no longer even know how that traditional pattern is made. It’s a kind of origami folding technique: I look at the finished work and, except for the fact that I recognize the main fabric was from a dress that I once wore, I wouldn’t know that I was the one who had made it. So how treasured is that? Well, at least it is a brand-new quilt that is simultaneously and instantly a vintage quilt.

Perhaps the dispersing can be put off until the finishing is done. And then, well, maybe I could start shipping the treasured and finished objects around to friends who are older than I am. If everybody disperses upward, at least we will have avoided burdening the future with our past. But those centenarians are going to have to get much bigger houses in which to store everything.

Cloth of the World

I’m not sure whether it’s an ordinary stage in late life, or the stage of finally facing up to all the stuff one has gathered up over the years, but whichever, I’ve gotten to that stage. For you, it may be shoes or clothes, but for me, it’s fabric for quilts. For years, I’ve been buying more than I needed, because I eventually would need it. But at this point, with about 10-15 average years left to me, there’s no chance I will ever use this all up. So, I’ve sort of decided to work on using it all up.

Part of that work has been roughly to assess what’s around. In that search, I came upon a nice group of relatively small amounts (less than a half-yard each) of ethnic fabrics, primarily from Africa, Indonesia, and India. The reason they’re in a drawer together is that they don’t blend well with American fabrics, but they do very nicely with each other. I took them all out, cut them up into pieces that would work in a traditional pattern called ‘square in a square,’ and when i had about 250 of them, I turned it all into a queen-sized quilt top. Now it has to be quilted, but because I am primarily a hand quilter of large quilts, that will take some time and, in any case, that is evening work.

So, in the daytime, I took all the pieces left over and sewed them together more or less randomly and finished up a second, though much smaller quilt, a nice size for putting over your lap on a cool fall day. Looking around, a month later, of course, I see no sign that anything has been used up, but I suppose one day I will look around and it will all be gone. That’s hope not a plan, I’m pretty sure, but I like to pretend it’s a plan.

What struck me about all these beautiful ethnic, hand-made fabrics (printed, painted, batiked, whatever, all show the sign of somebody’s hand) is that they represent something we no longer really have in the U.S.—hand-made fabrics that arise from local design traditions. I thought about calling this quilt ‘Third World Beauties,’ but it seemed somehow less than complimentary to refer to these countries' and their peoples’ work as ‘third world.’ Not like wonderful us in the first world. Well, it’s true, of course, these people are different. They know how to make marks of beauty on cloth and most of us in the West haven’t a clue how it’s done and certainly don’t have any local traditions to help us along in the process, nor, of course, any particular desire to do such laborious, time-consuming work even if we did know how.

U.S. fabric is beautifully designed, but it’s designed in the ‘modern’ way that leaves no room for the designer to leave her touch. The designer was a long way away from the American fabric that I use; American fabric is machine-made all the way. And it looks like it. Yards and yards of it pour out of a giant machine, every yard exactly like every other yard. The ethnic fabrics, not so much. They are strangely irregular, their designs surprising and beautifully irregular, simpler in a very compelling way that actually makes them more complex, whereas U.S. fabrics just appear complicated.

Some American quilters are reaching out to the spirit represented by these 'Third World' artisans, these artists, though, and are increasingly making quilts whose every piece of fabric has been designed and colored—painted, dyed, stamped, written upon, all the methods by which you can get marks and color on cloth—by their own hand. We would never think to call their work ‘ethnic’ because it does not come out of any cultural base, any ethnos, I guess. So we call it art, instead. But would we call their quilts ‘First World Beauties’?

Here Today, Here Tomorrow

I was having coffee with some locals today and someone commented upon how quickly groups on the Point disappear. There are always a lot of high hopes for one leader with one good idea: raising money for a lighthouse for Lighthouse Park, rebuilding the pier, restoring the cannery, whatever. Followed by a brief plateau and a quick decline. It may have to do with the fact that people know each other here in a way that makes them feel awfully free to criticize one another in a way that wouldn't happen in a more urban environment where you see less of one another. It isn’t like a family, really, but the criticism sometimes can feel as if it were. Or it may be that the leaders never want to give up their leadership. I don’t know.

The quilters group has been in existence here for over ten years, with a string of accomplishments, more still on their plates, and a large amount of good will toward one another and from the community. The group started by making a large ‘Community Quilt’ that is now in the entry way of the Community Center (which houses the library and several large meeting rooms). That quilt, which is based upon photos of old buildings in Point Roberts (some still here, but most, not), hangs behind Plexiglas and everyone who lives here has seen it, I'd guess. It has 12 large blocks plus a large center medallion, and each one of the quilters made one of the blocks, while three or four of them also worked on different parts of the medallion. The original group included a few people who knew how to sew but had never made a quilt, so starting with a large pictorial block was something of a challenge. It was impressive, however, the way everyone rose to the challenge and, even at the end, spirits were pretty high.

Nevertheless, it has to be said that 3 or 4 people washed out pretty soon after that experience and if it had not been for a few new people coming in, the quilting group might have stopped right there, despite all the success of finishing the Community Quilt. The group at the beginning had 12 members and a decade later still has about 12 members, but only eight of them were in that original group. People are a little fluid in their lives, as some people go away for the winter or the spring or the summer, but we keep on meeting, more or less the 12 apostlettes of quilting, sans leader.

Since that initial quilt was hung, we have made a large lighthouse-themed quilt that was raffled for the now-lost project to get a lighthouse in Lighthouse Park; we have made a large, traditional, geometric-patterned raffle quilt to raise money for the food bank; we have made a smaller ‘Boat Quilt’ that hangs in the local health clinic (open 3 days a week and staffed by a nurse practitioner); we contributed an outdoor quilt made of colored tarp pieces to the transfer station (where the recycles and other trash are transferred to somewhere else); we made a bird quilt for the elementary school, grades k-3; we made four large quilts of each of the Seasons in Pt. Roberts, all of which hang in the Lutheran Church’s great hall; and we are currently working on two quilts for the local library’s walls. We’ve had several shows here of our work, including one in conjunction with the Historical Society, one at a local art gallery, and one as part of a summer Art Walk. The Historical Socety took the images of the Community Quilt and had notecards made which, for a number of years, were sold at a local gift/craft store. We’ve made our mark here, but it hasn’t always been easy just because of our ease with one another, I think.

In the beginning, the two of us with the most experience were generally allowed to make serious decisions about what quilts would get made and how they were to be constructed. But over time, everybody else has developed the skills and experience that make us all peers in that respect. In this small place, when there is no obvious task before a newly formed group, it’s not really enough to have leaders and a good idea; there have to be enough followers to make the group work. For long-term survival, though, the followers have to stay with the work. Then one day you look around and it’s a group of leaders. And you’ve been doing whatever you’ve been doing for a decade and are the best of friends and are perhaps a little too free with your criticism.

Seeing As Art

Point Roberts has a moderately moribund Voters’ Association (all Americans) and an equally somnolent Property Owners’ Association (mostly Canadians, although American property owners can join). They keep some kind of indolent watch over the body politic here. Four or five years ago, the Voters’ Association, led by its president, became convinced that the sizable number of abandoned properties (houses, trailers, barns) was at the heart of our stagnant community and was preventing robust development. Somehow the absence of jobs and infrastructure was abandoned in the causative background.

The Property Owners’ Association was not worried about this phenomenon because it was largely their houses, trailers, and RV’s that were at issue. The Voters’ Association President made the 90-mile round trip to the county seat (Bellingham, in Whatcom County) to talk this all over with the County Council. Because, in fact, all this attractive nuisance property involved some kind of zoning violation, the County agreed to send someone up to issue notices of violation to the properties in question. And lo! The notices were made manifest.

I didn’t know anything about this because I never know much about anything until the monthly paper (The All Points Bulletin) comes out on the first of each month. When I saw the newspaper story, I was appalled because, although none of those abandoned properties were mine, there were several of them I was very fond of. They included houses on the main roads that one saw every day as they slowly returned from whence they came, a journey that would clearly take many years and had already been going on for many years.

Fearing that they would all disappear because of the county action, I did about all I could: I took pictures of the abandoned houses that I knew about, as well as inquired of friends about others that they might know about. It was obvious from the newspaper that there were more of them than I had imagined. Several had been immediately torn down before the newspaper even came out. However, after the county made its stand, it retreated back to Bellingham with, apparently, no follow-up. Still, those community members that liked these derelict houses felt that more attacks could come. In a crisis that doesn’t directly involve me, my first thought is, ‘Would a quilt help?’ Almost always, the answer to that question is, 'No.’ But, a quilt never hurts. So I decided to make a pictorial quilt of each of the houses I had photographed. I had never made a pictorial quilt before and had no drawing skills to speak of. But it somehow seemed doable because it seemed that it needed to be done.

A friend heard about my endeavor and arranged for me to visit more of these houses, ones off the main road, and to go inside them and photograph them. Several were among the first houses built in Pt. Roberts. Eventually, I had photographs of 17 buildings and eventually I made quilted portraits of each of them. The quilts range from fourteen-inches square, to about 52”x40”. You can see them here: Abandoned House Quilts. They have been on exhibit a number of times in various places and have taught me more about seeing and sewing than I would have imagined I could have learned. Here is a picture of a particular house in a particular field or a particular forest. Here is fabric. How do you make lovely, soft fabric look like wood and rocks and plants and doors and stone chimneys and ocean and things fresh and things decaying? Each new house posed the question anew and each had to be answered in a different way because each of the houses was different. They were old and they were usually collapsing in one way or another, but they had been cared about as homes and in some cases were still cared about for their past lives. They were surviving in their way with great dignity as they went through this long process.

Since I started this project, perhaps six of the houses have completed their lives: torn down for a new house and eventual home or collapsed entirely in severe weather. The quilted pictures of them will last, of course. That is something of a problem, though, as I am the custodian of all these quilts. Two have been entrusted to people whose lives were touched by the buildings: one a woman who rode horses in a barn now gone, the other a woman whose mother was born in a house now gone. But the rest are with me. Perhaps Ed should build a museum for them.

Regardless of what happens to them eventually, the process itself has tied me to the community in a way I would never have anticipated. They are my stake in Pt. Robert’s past and they anchor my present here. Unlike anywhere else I have ever lived (and there have been a lot of places), I am a part of this community.