by D'Arcy Hutton

Time travel. I think about it a lot. And when I do, the distant past feels so tangible. So present. I feel the same buoyant almost-vertigo I feel when swimming, goggled, in the clear waters of Lake Superior. There, I can peer down at vivid volkswagen-sized boulders, bright igneous rock with veins like butterscotch ripple, fifty feet below me. Far beyond my lung capacity, yet so close, separated only by a stone's throw expanse of something clear, airless, and cold, straight down. More like flying than swimming. The distant past feels like that: so vivid and close at hand, but just beyond my lung capacity. 

Maybe it's not a coincidence that the elements of water and geology are the chosen metaphors for my relationship to history. It was through the concepts of landscape-level tracking in the Canadian Shield landscape of my home region that I began practicing that momentary switch in perspective.

I've been feeling some self-applied pressure to post something about Thanksgiving, as gratitude is a value we try to role model consistently at Jumping Mouse. As the Facebook and blog posts full of concise and lovely expressions of gratitude pitter pattered down over the weekend, accumulating gently like tiny hailstones from an October cloudburst generated by a fast-moving low-pressure weather system, I felt reluctant to join in. And, understandably I think, reluctant to surrender any more of my Thanksgiving hours to my laptop's unblinking gaze. So I took to my sit spot, and the woods, and the meadows, and the gravel pits, and the family suppers of my hometown of Chelsea, Quebec.