My invitation to do so appeared on the front page of the New York Times Travel Section on October 2, 2017, with the headline: “Vancouver Island, Through an Artist’s Eyes.” Beneath an intriguing photo of a trail into a Pacific Coast rainforest, the feature’s first line revealed the artist’s identity. “Revered in British Columbia, little known in the U.S., the artist Emily Carr, born in Victoria in 1871, may be from another era, but amid environmental concerns, her works and images resonate.”

Zunoqua of the Cat Village, 1930

I’d been introduced to Emily’s Carr’s ground-breaking work in a Canadian Literature class taught by poet Deborah Keenan at Hamline University in 2004. Emily Carr: An Introduction of Her Life and Art by Anne Newlands was one of the assigned texts. The book was only 64 pages long, yet the color plates of this unconventional woman’s paintings spoke to me in a way no other visual artist’s work ever had.

I couldn’t articulate why. All I knew was that these images—created by an artist who nicknamed herself ‘Small’ as a child—brought to life a hidden part of me, raw and tender, foreign, yet totally familiar. Later, when I researched and read more about Carr’s life, she became a kind of imaginary friend, a kindred spirit much like I’ve always felt about the Anne of Green Gables author Lucy Maud Montgomery.

Emily Carr (Small, 1876)

The Times article highlighted two major exhibitions of Carr’s art: “Emily Carr: Into the Forest” (at the Vancouver Art Gallery, May 13 – December 3, 2017), and “Picturing the Giants: The Changing Landscapes of Emily Carr” at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (June 10 – April 1, 2018). The window of time in which to see both exhibits in a single trip to British Columbia was running out.

My desire to see the originals was so strong that I decided I would travel there alone if I couldn’t find a travelling companion. To my surprise, my always-busy husband Ralph cleared his calendar for a week to accompany me.

Usually when we take a trip together, Ralph—a more experienced traveler than I—makes the arrangements. But this time, I quickly booked flights from Minneapolis, reserved two seats on the ferry between Vancouver and Victoria through BC Connector, pre-purchased tickets to the art exhibits, and took advantage of off-season hotel rates for accommodations at two grand, historic Canadian Pacific railway hotels.

The Fairmont Empress, Victoria, BC

Since the Emily Carr House in Victoria, her childhood home, was closed to the public for the season, a friend suggested that I request a private tour. Jan Ross, the curator of the provincial heritage site, graciously agreed to do so.

We departed Minnesota on November 8th with only three “must-do’s” planned in advance. We left the remainder of the sightseeing and dining adventures to chance, as our spirits and the unpredictable rainy-season weather dictated.

I have always loved being in Canada; once I arrive, I always feel like I have come back home.

The Homecoming, Nathan Scott, sculptor,Victoria, BC

Were Emily Carr’s richly drawn paintings of First Nations villages and totems, dark, haunting forests, wild beaches and vast skies all I imagined they would be?

In next week’s blog post, I’ll share my answer.

Eileen at Vancouver Art Gallery, November 9, 2017

In Chapter 23 of The Secrets of Eastcliff-by-the-Sea, “Tea Party,” Annaliese hosts a tea party for her three cousins and their sock monkeys. Nora, Nadine, and Nell Ann have a surprise for Annaliese … their mother gave their sock monkeys away! So how will the cousins be able to attend Great-Grandmama Easterling’s birthday party? Only the sock monkeys received invitations. 

It was a lovely tea party that Annaliese and Miss Pine set out for their guests. Throckmorton sat at the sock monkeys’ table, covered with a lace tablecloth and Throckmorton’s favorite doll dishes, “the ones with daffodils and aqua rabbits.”

“On a larger table, also set for four, a three-tier silver serving dish held dainty petit fours and finger sandwiches cut into hearts, diamonds, clubs, and spades. Devonshire cream, lemon curd, and rosy-red jam accompanied a basket of freshly baked currant scones.”

“Serving the catty cousins,” illustration copyright Sarah Jane Wright from The Secrets of Eastcliff-by-the-Sea, Beach Lane Books

One of the sources that provided inspiration for this tea party is The Anne of Green Gables Treasury (Carolyn Strom Collins, Christina Wyss Eriksson, Ruth Macdonald and David Macdonald, Penguin Books Canada Limited, 1991,) Chapter Five, “Tea Time.”

“The teas that are described most fully in the Anne books are of the special-occasion variety that consisted of treats such as sandwiches, fresh or preserved fruits, cheese, breads, cookies, cakes, pies, tarts, and other desserts. “A splendid tea,” as Anne described one of her Sunday School picnics, would have included those kinds of dishes as well as more substantial fare—meats, salads and vegetables. Extra-special treats such as ice cream assured the success of such occasions.”

The authors go on to say:

“A variety of tiny sandwiches served with the first cup of tea is a fitting beginning for any tea party. Finely textured white bread is most often used for tea sandwiches, but you can also choose whole wheat or light rye or a combination of breads. Slice the bread as thinly as you can—about 1/4 inch slices are ideal.”

Here’s a recipe for finger sandwiches from this cherished book.

_____________________________________

CHICKEN SALAD SANDWICHES

From: The Anne of Green Gables Treasury

1 cup finely chopped cooked chicken
1/4 cup finely chopped celery
1 hard-boiled egg, peeled and finely chopped
1 Tbsp finely chopped sweet pickle or sweet pickle relish
1 tsp finely chopped green onion
2 to 3 Tbsp mayonnaise
Salt and pepper to taste
6 thin slices bread
Butter, at room temperature

1. In a bowl, mix together the chicken, celery, egg, pickle, and green onions. Stir in the mayonnaise until you have a nice moist mixture. Add salt and pepper to taste. Keep the mixture in the refrigerator, covered, until you are ready ot make the sandwiches.
2. Butter each slice of bread on one side. Spread the filling on three of the buttered slices and top with the remaining slice of bread. Trim the crusts off the sandwiches and cut each sandwich into shapes.

Makes 3 whole sandwiches

Six months earlier, on the way home from a party near dawn, I’d totaled a white Volkswagen Beetle. Somersaulting through the convertible’s rag-top roof, twenty-three years of life flashed before my eyes; and I didn’t like what I saw. Too late, I thought. When my body stops rolling, I’ll be dead.

Twenty-two days after the accident, with every inch of my skin blotted with greenish-yellow bruises, I married a man whom I’d met at that party.

Later, when he asked me where I wanted to go on our honeymoon, I answered, “Prince Edward Island—because I want to see the island where Anne of Green Gables took place.”

The book’s protagonist was my childhood heroine. Anne Shirley was spunky and made mistakes. I envied her untamed imagination and indomitable spirit. Growing up in a small, red brick house where talking about feelings was forbidden, Anne was my true kindred spirit.

We honeymooners headed north from Wisconsin in a brown Ford van to Sault Ste. Marie, camped near Sudbury, showered in Quebec, and at Cape Tormentine boarded the car ferry to cross the Northumberland Strait.

L. M. Montgomery’s descriptions did not disappoint. The gables were green, the soil was red, the gulf waters cobalt beneath a periwinkle sky. We boiled lobsters in a pot over a campfire near the windswept dunes, and I believed with Anne Shirley’s fervor that our rash marriage would last forever.

As early as 1897, a journalist with Prince Edward Island Illustrated wrote: “This is the place for weary men and women to come to build up worn-out tissue, to rest the mind, to banish weariness.” So ten years later, divorced, with two young daughters in tow, I returned to the Island, worn out and weary. We flew from Halifax into Charlottetown by prop plane during a thunderstorm. I can still see the fear in my children’s eyes and the pink and lavender packs strapped to their backs.

I returned to PEI almost every summer after that. Seventeen grueling years as a public school administrator had taken its toll on my health and spirit. Ultimately, Chronic Fatigue Immune Dysfunction (CFS) and companion depression trapped me in its insidious net.

One cloudless morning in the summer of 1999, I was sitting on a barn red, double-sided, wooden bench on the porch of a run-down cottage that my second husband and I had purchased on Argyle Shore. I could see the coast of Nova Scotia and a peppermint-striped lighthouse guarding its shore. A pair of seals, as black and shiny as a fisherman’s slicker, swam in unison through the gentle surf and shallow waters.

It was the time between tides.

I waited for my nearest neighbor—a red fox—to steal past for his morning drink from a fresh water stream that slices the bank on its way to the sea, and I thought about the musty-smelling sixth-grade autobiography that I’d recently found buried in a box labeled “Eileen’s Things” in my mother’s basement.

My brother had sketched my face on the cover, complete with pointy black plastic glasses. Below my penciled likeness, I’d written, “You are a Portrait in the Picture of Life.” On the back page, my teacher Mrs. Ross had penned in red ink: “This is excellent from beginning to end. I hope you will always keep your zest for living and learning.”

Re-reading my eager, honest, child-like words I remembered how my mother had hovered during the biography’s creation—reminding me to check my grammar, correct my punctuation. “Use your best penmanship,” she admonished. “If you make a mistake, don’t cross it out, start over.”

Calmed by the sea, I could hear her voice. I could feel her pride. By this time Alzheimer’s disease had destroyed her mind, silenced her voice. I wondered, “Do I still have time?”

On Prince Edward Island red clay soil brings forth lavender lupines that line ditches along dusty country roads. Rose-red fireweed creeps between prolific rows of new potatoes. “The lowest ebb,” writes Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “is the turn of the tide.”

Within the next year I would enroll in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at St. Paul’s Hamline University. Almost 30 years after my first visit to PEI, I was assigned to write 20 pages of creative prose that thematically reflected Canadian literature. I knew my story would take place on Prince Edward Island.

I asked myself, “What if a Yorkshire terrier from Manhattan washed up on the south shore of PEI, tangled in a lobster trap, and met that red fox? What themes could I capture in that story?”

My first published novel for young readers, Tango: The Tale of an Island Dog, was my response.