Girls and Kittens

First Bookbinding Commission

This is the first commission work I've done. It's a sketchbook for my new roommate's mother's birthday. This little one will be sent to England to be used by an artist.

You can see more books on my Flickr.

I'm pretty stoked. Tomorrow, commission number 2. Recipe card book. Should be awesome.

Things are good here, for now. The storms are calming and the heat is lifting in all forms and figures. Things are changing both rapid and immediate, as if by firing squad, but also gradual as sedimentary rock.

Summer in Halifax is unlike any other. The grass, and everything else is nearly always damp. Clothes never fully dry between loads moving from piles of dirty to wet to post-dryer to hamper to dresser to be pulled out and worn before landing again in the dirty pile. The dirty pile seems more exhausted than dirty. Like our clothing the hot and damp rumple us an make us irritable. We go about our day, but with something else, something unexpected and uncomfortable. This heavy wetness in our lungs, is it the air? Or are we barely breathing beneath the weight of our routine expectations, retreat and advance.

We dip our toes in the lake, dead lake. We go swimming an add our life to the water. The hair kinks behind little cats ears and we flop like her, so hot and tired.

There is inspiration and torment. Inspiration ripping through us, flee, but come back it says. We forget to edit, just send, between our lips then gone, we are confused and confusion.

This is summer in Halifax and it smells just right, damp clover never smelled so strong. There is a new you and new me, discovering our places between the old you and the old me.

We push up against each other in a spurt, a wave of desire and longing, forgetting our discomfort, restraint and deterrence. Laughing we come back to each other, not really knowing what has happened, or what will happen. We are happy as we press our foreheads together as only we do, imitating children or sea creatures.

Like Kerouac I use too many commas when I free-associate, or too few, or too many and too few in all the wrong places.

This is not proper English.

This is summer in Halifax.

summer so far.