Orange Blood

I bet you think this is about the NDP Leadership convention.

Think again.

This weekend I got to attend a convention of my own.

A genuine Women’s Convention of closely related Sistah’s.  Blood related, tightly knit group of women, congregating in Chemainus.  A town of history, artistry… Grace.

We meet annually, before the calender switches to “tourist season”.  Every year, we descend on a different location, laden with appies and photograghs and stories of valour.  We eat and we drink and we shop.  The world’s problems get mulled over, steeped in wine and whiskey and beer and chased with fruit salad for breakfast and digested with truth and empathy.

Chemainus is the little town that could.  A mill town that faced the inevitable downturn when BC Forestry practices came home to roost, they envisioned a life beyond the corporation and they diversified in the most positive way.  They painted these murals all over town, historical depictions of the history of the region.  Walk through town (easily accomplished by even the most unathletic of pedestrian) and experience the warmth of small town Vancouver Island hospitality.  Small shops, local artisans of everything from textiles to pottery to soaps that smell good enough to eat.  Peppered throughout with amazing murals of various historical stories and salted with local personality.  The architecture exudes the frontier spirit that our ancesters personified, but it’s been painted over in vibrant shades of purple, blue and yellow, a virtual rainbow of colonialism in the Victorian tradition.

The weather co-operated, as it does on this left coast, when we need it the most.

When I arrived home early this afternoon, the hearth was cold, the wood stock depleted.  Outside lay an alder log, bucked into rounds.  I felt up to the challenge, despite having five hours sleep last night.  I slayed those rounds.  There is a zen to chopping firewood, you have to read the wood.  The knots, the whorls, the pockets of pitch that inevitabley end up on your hands, that is the perfume of life here.

Alder bleeds an orange blood, it smells like smoked salmon.

Cedar carves.  Yellow is gold.

Yew is rare, precious.

We need to protect our heritage.

No matter what.