Alan Skeoch

Author: Alan Skeoch

  • Marjorie sends her pictures of the log cabin

    Dateline Jan. 4, 2023
    Story is coming…a mystery story the could have been tragic had not Mike’s hand clenched my collar as I raced head down under the foaming white water trapped by the thwarts of the canoe. Where did this happen? Why was the story never told.]?
    alan

  • EPISODE 709 IMAGINE WHEN NIGHTFALL CAME AND ALL OUR WORLD WAS DARK….The Schneller Log Cabin, January 1, 2023

    EPISODE  709     IMAGINE WHEN NIGHTFALL CAME AND ALL OUR WORLD WAS DARK….The Schneller Log Cabin, January 1, 2023


    alan skeoch
    January 1, 2023





    JUST IMAGINE LIFE IN THIS CABIN…TONIGHT, JANUARY 1, 2023

    There was a time not long ago when light at night depended upon candles and kerosene.
    Imagine that.  IMAGINE  THE DARKNESS.  The sun provides us with the light and heat that miraculously created life on earth.
    When the cloak of night covers us we can visualize…feel, as our bodies shake in the absence of the sun.

    Every year for the past four decades the Schneller family move from their electricity powered
    home to their log cabin in the garden where the only source of light and heat is a wood
    stove, candles and kerosene lamps.  Dim….very dim.  Bodies move in the shadows.
    Dinner plates grate their way from the stove to piles of food almost beyond the candle glow.

    It does not take much imagination to understand what life on earth was like 170 years ago, around 1850,
    when this cabin was hacked out of  a white pine forest in Perth County with spaces between
    the logs chinked with mortar …mortar given body by the rank smelling hair of hogs killed to sustain
    life.

    Brad’s friend, Dave Poor, supervised the careful demolition of this cabin and its shipment
    by trucks to Erindale in Mississauga.  His son Geoffrey was here last night as were the
    Schnellers…Sandra, Bradley, Suzanne, David, Evan and Anne.   Marjorie and I have been guests
    in this annual celebration of life for as long as this cabin has stood for 40 years or more…Honoured.

    .  Nine people..nine shadows moving in the ephemeral  glow of candles,  kerosene lamps and  the wood stove.

     and then someone touched a switch to the New years.
    dinner was lit by a surge of electricity that came and went in the twinkling of an eye..
    just enough time to get one single photograph of our celebrants.

    Time enough to to think of first inhabitants of this place.  Pioneer families were often large….five, six, ten children.  Yet their homes
    were as small as this cabin…one single room, maybe 20 x 30 where a family ate and slept
    and procreated.  Cursed and prayed…lived.

    Unseen in the shadows, I flopped on the single bed and dosed off while the bodies around
    me moved and belched, farted and began to get ready for bed on the floor or in the store room
    up above where Brad has am endless war with red squirrels, raccoons, mice and skunks.
    Perhaps a rat or two that Brad has never acknowledged .
    And Other living things.  

    The last person down blows out the candles and douses the lamps with metal spoon.
    The embers in the stove will not last long but the heat and stink of unwashed bodies
    will remind us all that our lives are saved by the miracle of exploding gasses of helium
    and hydrogen in that ball of not quite eternal fire we call the sun.

    Happy New year…2023! 



    Shadows moving back and forth in flickering light of candles and kerosene.  Time for bed…on the floor because I am near asleep on the single bed in the room.



    Should we disrobe? I think not.  There are not enough feathers in the comforter to keep us warm,   We will keep our winter clothes on our bodies until
    the sun warms the swamp enough for us to peel the caked grime of winter from our boots, clothes and skin.   Hold your breath!

    alan skeoch

  • EPISODE 709 WHY WOULD YOU BE INTERESTED IN A SWISS WEDDING…3 REASONS (AUGUST 2011)

    EPISODE  709   WHY WOULD YOU BE INTERESTED IN A SWISS WEDDING…3 REASONS  (AUGUST 2011)


    alan Skeoch
    Dec. 31, 2022




    Weddings are just too personal.  What I mean to say is weddings are all wrapped up
    in love affairs between two people, in this case Natalie Muller and Martin Leuthi.  Swiss pair.
    At weddings  Lots of 
    pictures are taken and shoved under the wedding bed for decades…sometimes never
    opened.  So why would you be interested in a wedding that happened in Switzerland
    in 2011.  Why?  Because it was weird…never to be forgotten.





    Martin rented an ancient bus to get us all to the wedding on time.  Bus should have been in the car rally.


    Martin greeted everyone as if he ws holding a papal audience at the Vatican.

    This is Martin Leuthi.  He is an extrovert….warm hearted.  But also skilled, he builds
    the turbines that make jet engines fly and huge turbines or electric power.  Talking to
    him rarely involves talk of turbines.  Instead he is more than likely to ask what
    you do rather than what he does.   Easy to see that in his grin.

    The two Kevins…Kevin Skeoch and Kevin Leuthi…one very skilled with the yo-yo.  The other Kevin is married to Martin’s sister, Gabriela who is featured later in
    this story.    You will be amused for sure.


    That’s the bride, Natalie talking with Verner Leuthi, father of the groom.


    “Alan, have you ever used a yo yo?
    “Long time ago.”
    “Watch this.”

    And Kevin entertained us….an expert with the yo yo,  A skill forgotten by most of us.



    After the yo yo came the car rally.  All on  the road in front of the reception hall.  See how many cars you can identify.


    Any luck with the the identification ?


    After the wedding we stayed in a former convent then hit the highway back towards Crouh End in London, England.  We never completed the trip home.



    “Alan, you pump the gas while I pay,” said Gabriela
    “Diesel or regular gas?”
    “Regular, I guess.”

    Gabriela guessed wrong/  We drove a couple of miles and the
    Land Rover suddenly stopped…just enough motion to hit the ditch.




    Those pictures tell the story.  Called a tow truck…came…lifted everybody except me into the air…drove to a garage…”Tank has to
    be pumped, cleaned”…overnight in a hoel for local Europeans….i.e. bunk beds in tiny room, cheap…morning baguettes and cheese and coffee…nice.

    Kids grow up and sometimes forget the small disasters in life.   No one will forget the diesel error.

    There you have it…the yo-yo, the car rally, the diesel mistake.  The wedding?  Hard to forget…maybe
    a few pics of the wedding should be included.  It was a grand affair. Unforgettable.  Very Swiss.

    alan

  • EPISODE 707 MAKING WOODEN QUILTS—START WITH A WARM AND FUZZY IDEA, DEC. 29, 2022

    EPISODE   707     MAKING WOODEN QUILTS—START WITH A WARM AND FUZZY IDEA, DEC. 29, 2022


    alan skeoch
    dec. 2022




    MAKING WOODEN QUILTS

    Usually I start a wooden picture with a warm and fuzzy idea. THEN Imagination become concrete.
    I am not an artist really….would like to be but difficult to find time to get the charcoal lines
    in some meaningful order.  More of a dreamer. So I work with small pieces of wood rescued from ancient lumber…old
    door frames, pine flooring, battered snow fence, lathing hidden behind cracking plaster in our old
    farm house upon restoration.  Abused wood takes on a patina that is impossible to replicate especially when
    made alive with a belt sander or shaped by my band saw.

    No.  I do not solicit praise or buyers.  Just do the pictures because I like them.  Favourite colours are 
    forest green, deep red, abused brown…a touch of yellow.  All nailed to a backer board from a barn demolition
    or a castaway snow fence.  Or any piece of wood that looks interesting.  Even parts from
    a 16h century farm machine. These machines were once made of wood then painted.  Old paint has
    its own appeal…faded, cracked, rubbed away by human hands. NICE!

    Currently I am constructing a forest of white pines that have been touched by he first snowfall
    of 2023.   You Want a job?   Rearrange the trees to suit yourself.  I had an audience on this job…grandkids now
    adults…who stayed with me in the shop until the weather drove them back into the house leaving me
    alone.  Marjorie often throws ideas at me or says “come into the house, you will get a death of cold
    in that old workshop”

    WHAT IS TODAY’S WARM AN FUZZY IDEA?

    IT must have been around 1920 that Edward Freeman planted a small forest of spruce trees as
    a wind break on the north side of his farm house.  Today these trees tower over all others on the farm.
    Maybe I can replicate this forest.   Couple that memory with the the year 1964 when Marjorie, Eric and I
    reforested the entire farm with red pines that now have joined Granddad’s spruce forest.  Then there is
    the most ancient tree on the farm, a white pine that has been battered and triumphed over lightning strikes
    and abuse for longer than we owned the farm.  Why not put our all this together into a wooden quilt forest
    that has just been dusted by a winter snowstorm.



    HOW IS THIS WARM AND FUZZY IDEA MADE INTO A 3D* PICTURE?’
    (*Three dimensional )

    Take a look at the pictures of the forest as it emerges below.  Is there a secret formula?
    No.  Just a lot of time…a band saw, a belt sander, a couple of cans of paint.  The trick is
    putting a dusting of snow on the pine trees.  Maybe you can solve that mystery..

    My workshop was once A mink house,  then became a chicken coop, and now a workshop . The door and sidelights were rescued
    from a big bin of scrap when the ancient Port Credit hardware store was converted to a fast food restaurant.

     
    Start with a sketch.  In this case a gothic farmhouse which lives in a forest.   Fast sketch. Numbers important…i.w. number 1 = half an inch.

  • EPISODE 706 CHRISTMAS DAY == A FOLK ART CELEBRATION, DEC. 25, 2022

    EPISODE 706     CHRISTMAS DAY == A FOLK ART CELEBRATION  DEC. 25,2022


    alan skeoch
    dec. 25, 2022




    The weather outside was terrible…a flat freeze bomb covered most of North America.  So cold
    that a short drive on the ATV was unpleasant.  better to hive ourselves away in the house
    and workshop.




    Please do not consider these pictures self serving. Like Browning’s poem ‘My Last Duchess’/.
    We are fullly aware of our good fortune while we live in a world where many people are poor and hungry
    with little chance of better times on the horizon.  Folk art night provide some relief so the pictures are
    loaded with imperfect images/    We enjoyed Christmas time and hope many of you have the same
    joyful time.