April 6, 2007

So, it's Easter weekend. Happy Easter!

Steph and Glenn are home, in Ottawa, and I have done my running around - it's so peaceful, for the first time in weeks, I think. The house is filled with colour - flowers, chocolate eggs, people, paintings. Dog!

It's not so colourful outside though! I am waiting for this miracle - my first real sign of Spring:

This is a closeup of my beautiful, fragile, peach Azalea. And in the front yard, I am waiting for my Crab Apple tree to bloom. It is even more fragile than the Azalea -the blooms open in the gusts of Spring, and usually the second day after the blossoms are out, I come home




with wet leaves plastered to my windshield, to a pink lawn, and a bedraggled, naked tree. Don't really know why I have this tree any more - I wait all year for its two days of bloom, and it has grown big enough that its shade interferes with these pink roses that used to cover the lawn.



That's a lot of pink for one blog!



I am going to add two pictures, in a different colour, of another of my favourite "It's Spring in Ottawa' sights.


Wild and beautiful! HOG'S BACK FALLS











THE POETS' PATHWAY
Speaking of wild and beautiful...


Next weekend we are having a small gathering to read a few poems and celebrate Spring and talk about the Poets' Pathway that I am working on, with lots of other people of course. It's a wonderful project, truly, and it appeals to all my instincts. I remember writing about this before - well, sort of writing about it. In my blog of September 2006, I wrote about Archibald Lampman, and then a Poets' Walk. I said I might even volunteer. Well, I did, and have been working on it ever since. It is very exciting , a project of the Greenspace Alliance, and you can read about it on their website. A new site is about to open.

In a nutshell, people on this committee are working for a 30-kilometre path from Britannia to McCarthy Woods ( near Mooney's Bay) to Beechwood Cemetery, where many old Ottawa citizens are resting, including three of the best Confederation poets, A. Lampman, D.C. Scott and W.W. Campbell. The path would celebrate Canadian poetry, and Ottawa's poets, through preserving the land they walked and skied on, the land they trudged through and lay on, honored and studied, the new, wild and beautiful land that inspired a first outpouring of love for a new country.
Ottawa is still the centre of the country's poet-making tradition. How fitting then, to have such a living monument to all Canada's poets.


Here's a picture of Archibald Lampman. He is a romantic figure, having had a sad love affair, and dying at the age of 37.

That's about the age of Lord Byron at his death, and Lampman is in many ways like the Romantic poets- Wordsworth,Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Byron, all of whom loved nature and most of whom died young. I was in love with all those poets when I studied them in university. They were young and rebellious and thoughtful, and all for nature and wildness and freedom and the common man! Archibald Lampman worked at the post office downtown, that imposing building on Sparks St.