becher street circa 1998

A view out a window with plants trailing from a shelf on the right, two cats on the sill on the left, and a row of trees in the background.

While searching through old blog photos looking for something else, I came across this scan of a photo that is still tucked in the corner of my corkboard in the sewing room. It’s my sweet kitties Benny Bibsley and The Fuzzy Pickle back when we lived in the top of a 1.5 storey house on Becher Street in London, Ontario. There wasn’t a screen in this window and I would open it to let Benny and Pickle outside where they would run up and down the roof. This was also the closest thing I had to a porch in this apartment, and I would sit on the sill with my legs stretched out on the roof and drink tequila and orange juice. The back 40 stretched all the way back to a wooded slope that led down to a floodplain full of soccer pitches and beyond them, the river. We moved out of here when the trees were starting to be cut down for a new lane of houses to be built parallel to our street.

clown

Clowns have been all over the news lately and it reminded me of my favourite clown sighting. Perhaps it’s actually more of a skeleton sighting, but either way you have to admit this kid is amazing.

Meditating clown/skeleton kid, Kentucky Welcome Center, spring 2009.

My second favourite clown sighting happened last month at Dragon Con, when I overheard a man in the street yelling into a cellphone: “Aw shit! Aw SHIT! They got IT here man, they got IT here!” while around the corner, a clown with a balloon slipped off into the crowd.