Soaking up the last bits of fall...

 

香港/Steveston

Steveston, once upon a time a small fishing village. And now all the seafood are mostly gone and left with the seafood processing plants and the museum to show to the tourists of its bygone glory days.

Nothing is as it was…⠀

You cannot go back to the place you grew up. Or you can, but you won't find it. It won't be the same as you remember. As a young adult you remember houses, streets, lanes or special trees but you don't have a map in your head of how they all connect. The sadness of coming back home as an adult is you cannot recognize any of these houses, streets, lanes or special trees. The olds are all gone.

Everything is as it was. Nothing is as it was…⠀

你不能回到你長大的地方, 即使你可以回去, 你也不能找到它, 因為它不會和你記憶中的一樣, 你年輕時記得的房屋、街道、小巷或者是一棵特別的樹木, 你腦海中有張地圖可以把它們連接起來, 悲傷的是成年後再回去, 你無法認得出這些房屋、街道、小巷和那棵特別的樹木, 因為已經全部不在。

一切都照舊, 沒有一樣是照舊...

Photography by Karsten Petersen 1976

Joffre Lakes

I hiked the Joffre Lakes today. Not one lake but three Lakes. Each one is more beautiful than the last. An 11 km (6.8 miles) round-trip hike, this is one of the best hikes in Canada, thanks to the scenery along the route. Today total 23,824 steps = 15.96 kilometre

The monsters are back

Nothing to cerebrate, just arrival of monster ships, like Queen of Sheba, after three years of empty streets of Vancouver. The cruise ships are back. Before the pandemic, every year, towards the end of Spring, they sail back to Vancouver like migrating steel monsters responding to some secret calling. They will come and go all summer, pouring as many as 8000 wannabes into downtown Vancouver a day, three of them docked at Canada Place and two more over at Ballantyne Pier. They are massive, imposing, disruptive, controversial. They are the cruise ships. Tourism industry love them. Environmentalists hate them.

Cherry will blossom, regardless

It's springtime, and the cherry blossoms are very open and the air suffused with evergreen and moss both, which was almost too much. There are birds, and the angle of the sun made the water of Fraser River look emerald.

We’re still under the dark cloud of Covid-19. I use nature for therapy. I use my daily walk to make sense of what's happening out there everyday and to keep me sane. 

Hold on to this time, these few weeks when the sun is high and we remember only the best part of the year, and for a little while all is well, the hardship forgotten. Hold on to this, before it goes. Hold your loved ones close, tell them what they mean to you, be kind. This is the spring and it's very, very fleeting. 

The most perfect moment of my life

I read a lot as a child, starting one book as I finished the last. My whole world was reading books. Heck, it was my whole universe too – because that part of island was all I needed, and to be honest it was all I ever wanted. 

I was about six years old when a professional photographer took this photo in the school yard on my first day of school. My official day of learning to read. The three adults at the back of the photo were my great aunt, my mother and my grandmother, then there were my two younger brothers. I was so excited about starting school. 

It was a lifetime ago, and I can still smell those summer days in the best island in the world. Six years after the photo was taken, I was in the school yard taking photo again. I finished grade six. A milestone. 

Between that six years, every day after school, I was always hiding in a corner of the school yard reading. War and Peace, Les Misérables, Outlaws of the Marsh, or The Journey to the West…  But that photo, that black and white photo taken on a camera worth a medal, was probably the most perfect moment of my life – my family were smiling and healthy and as Edna St Vincent Millay said, Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies.