Victoria has Fallen Silent for Winter

Every Saturday afternoon Oliver and I drive out to Crapaud so that he can spend 90 minutes working with Jennifer Brown, his excellent art teacher.

As Crapaud is 35 minutes drive from our house, it doesn’t make any sense for me to drive home while he’s there, and so I find something to occupy myself in Greater Crapaud for an hour and a half.

Since late May this has, pleasantly, involved driving the short drive to Victoria-by-the-Sea and setting down at Island Chocolates for a Factory Coffee, an otherworldly delight that involves a chocolate-lined tumbler filled with coffee and topped with whipped cream; it is the single regular concession I make to living a sugarless life.

It doesn’t take 90 minutes to down a Factory Coffee, but they of Island Chocolates are very accommodating if I set myself up with my sketchbook at a remote table–on the deck in the summer, inside in the autumn–and while away my time interpreting Victoria with a pen. As a result, I have an unusual number of sketches of things that are in, around, and across the street therefrom:

As the autumn drew on, I realized that there would come a day when the chocolate shop, and Victoria itself, would close for winter.

Circumstances kept us away from Victoria for the past three weeks, so yesterday, as it happened, was that day: I arrived, faintly hopeful of some “maybe we should open” bug in the system to, alas, find the blinds drawn and the “closed” sign in the window, and Victoria silent as silent can be. With no Factory Coffee to occupy myself, I had to be content with taking Ethan for a snowy, cold walk in the (also closed, but penetrable) beachfront park and then hunkering down in my car at the main intersection in the village, sketching in the cold.

My sketch does not do justice to the delta between summertime beehive of activity and wintertime snug-in-a-bugness, perhaps because I’ve left out the barren trees and the foreboding clouds.

There are 26 weeks until the May 24th weekend when Victoria starts opening its doors again. A lot of cold and snowy sketches to come before my next coffee.

How many times can I sketch the lighthouse?