collections

A few weeks ago I came across an amazing post on the blog of Sculptress that got me thinking about my own tendency to be a collector of things. I started photographing my collections and then set them aside until I was inspired by Kathy's collection of beach finds to share my own. Here are some of my collections, each with a story and a place:

These are pebbles I gathered on a beach at the Baltic Sea near Łeba (pronounced weba) in May 2008 while visiting Poland with Jerzy. This was our happiest memory of the trip...walking along the windswept shore near the shifting dunes, picking up stones.

These are ptarmigan feathers that I gathered in Tasiujaq while doing a contract in Nunavik (Eastern Arctic in Northern Quebec) in May 2007. The hotel where I was staying was just on the outskirts of the small town of 277 people. The manager called my attention to the ptarmigan on the tundra outside, and as we were admiring them, a hunter drove up in his truck, pulled out a rifle, shot the lot, and loaded them up into his truck. The Inuit people live from the land and hunting is a way of life there. Afterwards, I wandered out to see if there was any evidence of the ptarmigan and I gathered these soft feathers.

Three vertebrae from an unknown animal found grouped together while on a canoe trip on the North Channel of Lake Huron. The Georgian Bay area is one of the most beautiful places in the world (I'm biased because I grew up in that area) and inspired many of the landscape paintings of the Group of Seven. If you click on this link, the painting you will see is The Bay of Islands by Franklin Carmichael and that's close to where I found these vertebrae.

These are wild cucumber pods collected in my backyard. I have a whole basket of them. I removed their prickly outer skins because I had a plan for the inner skeletons but never realized that plan. Some day...

These are pieces of shale that I collected in the Eastern Townships of Quebec while waiting on the side of the road for CAA (Canadian Auto Association) to come and tow away my beloved Toyota Tercel which had broken down. Sadly, that was its last journey.

My Jerzy is a gardener. He grows and nurtures things. If he finds a seed, he plants it. These are the thorns of tangerine trees planted by Jerzy at his old office. He planted a few trees in pots while he worked there as an electrical engineer and now he only does contracts for them and goes in once a week (I think primarily to tend to the plants!). He feels that the tangerine trees are his responsibility so he removes the thorns for public safety :) and brings them to me.

These are beech seed pods collected on a lovely walk in the Sudeten Mountains area in the Czech Republic, close to Jerzy's sister's place in Poland. She lives right on the border in a town called Paczkow. It's a beautiful region and we did many lovely walks through hills, forests and fields.

Snail shells collected on the shores of Lake Kagawong at our family cottage. This is on Manitoulin Island where I grew up and where my parents still live. A most beautiful place.

After I returned from Nunavik, in a kind of romantic, nostalgic gesture, I dug out the stones that were stuck in the bottom of my hiking boots and saved them as a record of where I had walked and journeyed. And now I do it still, as a kind of ritual. I have no idea where these particular stones came from but they are a marker of my feet's travels...