Coteau Views: Ways of Seeing
Welcome to Coteau Views!
My plan is a bloggish website with thoughts and writing and pictures, but who knows what will happen?
My husband and I live in Treaty Four territory, on the edge of the Missouri Coteau, where we share this land with
- two horses, Probie and Sundance
- a chill Lab named Riley and a misnamed Springer, Grace
- six red-eared sliders who don’t answer to their names, ever
- Philomena, Odette, Ursula and Thelma who lay lovely blue and chocolate eggs
- four cats: B. Mama, Reno, Icelyn and Yuki (also oblivious to appellation) who own the back deck
- a host of wildlife including over seventy bird species, mulies and jumpers, coyotes, foxes, varying hares, “stripies”, Richardson’s ground squirrels and, this year (2024) a delightful swack of fuzzy bottom bee-flies and way too many grasshoppers – both gone in 2025
- hills and hills of buckbrush, wolf willow and chokecherry, speargrass, gramma, crocus, sage, moss flox, psoralea, dotted blazing star, gumweed, wild licorice, gaillardia and wild rose
- anyone who cares to visit
- the many indigenous families who have lived here and left their tipi rings in the hundreds on the hills behind us
August 6th, 2023
Smokey. A day of troubling memory and the awkward flight of new wings: thrashers, orioles, yellow warblers in the garden and fruit trees. The prehistoric lift of herons from sloughs as we shop for flat rock and fossils on stone piles littering the hills around Dunkirk. Nice to see so many sloughs still toughing it out back in the hills.
Wearing green … 🙂
August 15th, 2023
A photo essay.
The writing process …
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September 24th, 2023
Tomatoes and grape jelly, watermelons, cantaloupe, honeydew. Squash, carrots and potatoes still waiting for the threat of frost.
Manitoba-maple-yellow, ash-golden – sun-shot leaves on the edge of fall, each one a memory of another ending, another beginning, accumulating leaf litter.
September 28th, 2023
A few days with a few hours to write, revise. Rewrote the beginning (again). Has the usual brilliance of a new draft (until it gets clobbered by time and a better idea)!
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October 17th, 2023
A long fall! Windy today after an unbelievably beautiful day yesterday. We did half our garden carrots, the second half today I think. Then they will go down in the beer/carrots/eggs fridge. New chickens – Francesca, Julianna and little Judith – settling in.
And does it get any more exciting than a Vikings-Chiefs game, US Bank Stadium??? Once in a lifetime bucket list and I’d do it again next week. Too much fun, even if we lost!
November 1st, 2023
Finally back to serious editing. Looking for a serious Rider-reader input, but going over text for coherence and clear images.
This poem has been kicking around for a long time – never seems quite right. Sure wish I could do the things I want to do with WordPress. Seems limited, or else I just don’t know how to do things. Like spacing. And moving things around.
Wild Geese
Raveling calls kindle
the dark, grief and desire
bared, skeined
to the last light
lingering …
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December 15th, 2023
Making bread is one of my favourite ways to spend a morning. It’s measured (no pun intended). You can’t rush the process; it slows you down to its pace. You work hard and then you let it rest for awhile.
MSS is resting. Time to for cookie-making, visiting and preparing for company. The quiet lights of the Advent wreath.
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December 16th, 2023
In beauty all day long may I walk
Through the returning seasons may I walk…
In old age wandering a trail of beauty, lively, may I walk
In beauty it ends
In beauty it ends
In beauty it ends
(from the closing prayer of the Navajo Way Blessing Ceremony)
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January 30th, 2024
Not much snow left – a few small, sloppy banks. The season has yielded two and a half lovely snushes (snowshoe excursions) so far. Scary warm weather. Nice day for ice fishing last Friday even if we “should have been there yesterday”. Classic.
Everyone going on a warm weather trip or planning to go. Why is it that when they ask if you are doing the same, you feel a bit apologetic? A bit like you ought to be, but there’s just something wrong with you. Huh.
Starting to look at Sloughbottom Two, working out story arch.
March 26th, 2024
Hot-cross buns. Very brisk walk. Looking for publishers of humour. Tomatoes planted, up and thriving under the grow-light. The shadow of drought lying in the bare stretches of pasture.
April 16th, 2024
Two days roaming the hills with Grace and Riley, the sun, the wind (!) and a billion crocuses.
May 20th, 2024
This be the busiest month, which is why not much writing happens in May. Most of the birds are back for another season in a land that is now green, green, beautiful green. We had more than two inches of rain in early May and the pastures don’t crunch anymore!
A not-so-warm wind today reminding me of the May long weekend we used to celebrate as kids: biking five miles from town to the farm where we planted looong rows of potatoes (two or three eyes to a piece) prepared by Dad ahead of time, cut side down into the lumpy ground (kerduffles we called the large, hard clumps left behind by the field cultivator), filling the last hole with the rest of the cut potatoes when we were tired of planting. Then eating our packed lunch and biking home again. Or maybe catching a ride with Dad if he wasn’t busy seeding. Good times lol.
Today only a short walk to the garden to finish the carrots, put in beets, Swiss chard, lettuce and onions. Too cold for anything else yet.
June 22nd, 2024
Twice the rain this year as last. Which isn’t to say we’re drowning this year, just that the last years have been extremely dry. Still, nice to see all that green and nice to look at the trees without grieving.
Managed a little camping in June: hiking, beach-combing, birding, fishing at Saskatchewan Landing. No crowds, just lots of green and wildflowers and birds. And cacti. Definitely gotta watch your step.
November 3rd, 2023
Why does poetry always seem better in your head when you are walking than it does when you actually put it down on the page?
grey overcast waiting – a stillness so profound moving through it seems a violation – scuff of boots and breath abrading the silence
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November 8th, 2023
Nothing sweeter than a snow day. Three to four inches of much needed moisture. A pair of grackles working over the Fuscia Girl crabapples until the magpies chase them off. Haven’t seen the robins today – have they have finally moved on? Spent yesterday reading and writing and repairing a quilt while watching Dark Winds. Good series.
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December 21st, 2023
solstice
skin of light stretched
tight against a black world
shape-shifting into remembrance
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January 7th, 2023
Digging through old poetry. Hoarfrost and snow thickening the world into winter. Dancing in the moment between meatloaf and cereal.
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January 15th, 2023
minus forty
the horses huddle white-backed
in the lee of the barn
breath pluming the dark
a mute prayer:
deliver us
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February, 2024
Rejection. Start again.
March 1st, 2024
Looking forward to the SWG Talking Fresh presentations. But … a storm is depositing much-needed snow. Tried to make it to the afternoon sessions but turned around at Belle Plaine, east of Moose Jaw – full out blizzard for about fifteen miles. Safe at home, I signed up for the online presentations and was able to catch two of them. Better than nothing. As, it turned out, was the snow. About four inches – hoping for more.
March 4th, 2024
Shoveled snow for a couple hours, Bob on the snow-blower and Terry coming over to pushout the yard with his tractor. Beautiful day to snowshoe, but my arms are up in … well you know … at the mention of more activity. Did get out yesterday – lovely snow but bitter wind. New gaiters are awesome!
Haha – dashed off a submission (the publisher’s reading window was closing right away) during my “at-home writer time” on Saturday. I feel like I should follow it up with an apology today – the pitch was pretty awful. I didn’t really know what I was doing. Goodness. So much more to getting published than writing!
So, besides framing a sequel, I need to research and write a decent pitch. How ever do people get bored or have nothing to do?
April 10th, 2024
Who knew writing a two-three page summary would be so challenging?
Lots of company and travelling in the last month. Birds beginning to show up, or pass through: tree sparrows, juncos, robins, meadowlarks, kildeer. A Cooper’s Hawk hit the window and was quite dazed. We kept the cats off and it seemed to recover – flew away.
April 18th, 2024
Sudden storms scab the sky, hard-driven
sleet blurs the horizon, shares nothing
all of the misery, none of the moisture –
a frozen scraping of spite –
cracked fissures of earth reach
deeper into next year country
December 5th, 2024
The unexpected gift of a few minutes to write…the treasure of darkness building another world around me, the door I closed on the cold this morning: this side shelter and seeds stirring.
