Waiting for Mary Poppins

With September's lengthening shadows, there will soon be a week or so in which our backyard trellis will duplicate itself in Shadowland on the back wall of the building across our laneway. This phenomenon always puts me in mind of Mary Poppins in my very favorite childhood books (and for goodness sakes, she neither looked nor behaved anything like Julie Andrews).

In one book of the series, Mary Poppins Walks Out the Door, the story ends with Mary P putting the Banks children to bed and then walking out of...the door that's reflected in the window of the nursery!  It was a long wait for me till the next Christmas when my aunt, to whom I owe my Mary Poppins enchantment, reliably produced the next in the series, Mary Poppins Comes Back' in which without ceremony, Mary and her trusty umbrella blew back into the Banks' lives on a March wind.

If Mary Poppins someday walks into our back yard through the shadow of the trellis, she'll find herself right at home in The Yellow House. For several reasons, our "new" home invites odd shadows and mystifying reflections that we still exclaim about. For one thing, the small window panes in our front door have bevelled edges, which produce oddities in themselves when viewed from an angle:

 When the sun is low, or the nearby street lamp is lit, the light will enter, reflect off the mirror on our antique wardrobe on the opposite wall, and bounce a multi-faceted reflection back onto the wall the door is set in...quite creepy when we first noticed it.

We had so much less light at our old house, with its smaller windows and abundantly treed street. Here, we have a delightful picture window, with no tall trees opposite, and the light streams in, to the great pleasure of the cats.

Sometimes the sun reflects off objects on our table and give us weird views on the ceiling like this one:

It was truly spooky the day after we'd been reading about the Flying Snakes of Indonesia when this image flew up to our ceiling:

Other mystifying effects result through the combination of the picture window and the placement of our main floor twelve steps above ground level (a not uncommon design feature of the old houses in this Vancouver neighbourhood). Sunlight will bounce off cars parked in the street below, casting weird shadowed reflections as far back as the chimney wall more than halfway into the depth of the house. Our faithful wooden camel and a table lamp starred in this one:

And the amateur photographer stars in this one, as I try to capture the mystery of it all:

The most puzzling and sometimes eerie reflections of all appear in the double-paned glass of the front window -- true Mary Poppins country -- but they're best seen when a single kitchen light shines in the darkness, elusive to the camera.

The Yellow House has its charms, but ...have I said this before?...we miss our old place. The old one had just one fascinating shadow, one we never tired of seeing: one cat or another sitting in a morning window above the staircase landing. For this, I'll borrow the title of Jung's autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections.