J. Frost Co.

By Conrad Beaubien

It only took a quick trip to the woodpile by my back door to feel my fingers a little numb on the keyboard as I write this. The offset is that the temperature seems true to the season. An old friend of the cold has revisited from wherever the makings of frost come from. I expect some haunt of alchemists where the design department works in tandem with the manufacturers of frozen, who in turn are allied with the moisture department. In my view, credit needs to be taken by all, but it seems there is an ultimate force of being, a genie whose artistry is applied as a last touch onto my window panes.

You see, practical folks talk about heat loss and that sort of thing when it comes to windows, but while I’m conscious of wasted energy I can’t help but be taken by the beauty of frost on the square panes of the windows of my old house. Especially on a morning like this when the sun offers comfort as it lifts through the gentle weave of the pines over there just beyond the next yard where Joey, my neighbour’s solid Labrador dog the colour of a wheat field, make his early rounds.

I believe that the design consortium of J. Frost have had an ancestral influence on the makers of fine linen. The flax fields inherit the warmth of day, and then next the millers and spinners apply their enchantment until the subtle textures land into the hands of the pattern makers and weavers. I mean all of this conjures the windows of both of my grandmothers who had the most beautiful of Belgium lace curtains hung in a variety of window sizes just so frost patterns could be enjoyed all year round. At least it’s what it seemed like to a four-year-old kid who didn’t comprehend why there was beauty to be felt or that it was beauty I was beholding; it seemed to only occur to me that grandmothers’ windows had a mystifying effect. So a morning like this retrieves childhood memory and while those places were along the shores of mighty rivers like the Saint- Maurice or the Ottawa, the effect on the windows of my small writing room on the banks of Slab Creek renew with equal enthrallment.

As the sun reaches beyond the highest ridge of pines and now descends into my room it seems as if in an instant the frost on my windows has vanished. Gone like the snowmen of March, vaporized leaving little trace except a few droplets of moisture to remind me of the importance of savouring the moments as they occur; time can vanish leaving only remnants of faded awe to hang onto.

One such moment where I stopped to ponder and question the scene before me became a life changing event. It was a late April morning in the early 1980s when, with my left foot pushed down on the clutch pedal of my old Volvo station wagon, I dropped the gear stick into second as I navigated down a long hill north of Port Hope, Ontario. I was entering a valley, an anomaly in a relative flat plain that I had been travelling through; there were houses on either side of the road; two church steeples breeched the canopy of tall maples around. The lower the road unfolded, the more I felt like I was entering a story of time. A small bridge waited at the bottom of the hill and I pulled over by the side of the road to investigate.

The water ran free in the spirit of spring melt; it was as if the water gave voice to the view around. Yet storefronts and building facades from an early era told another story. Time worn, they seem to be somehow orphaned. This spot appeared to once have been an active Main Street, the centre of town. The faces of the buildings contradicted the aliveness of rolling hills and the song of the creek; the buildings lay empty. There was a uniformity of appeal, architecture mostly of red brick and seemingly built in a narrow window of time in a century past. I took a few pictures, walked in the vicinity for a short time. No other traffic passed my way and then I left.

As the four cylinders of my car pulled me up the incline on the opposite side of the bridge I began to re- imagine what it was that I had just experienced. A town lost in time I thought? What happened here; what are the makings of a place; what causes communities to gel at certain spots in a landscape. What effects would make a place change and be seemingly left behind in the way I just saw? My curiosity was now hooked and I became launched on discovery.

My career in the arts has evolved from music to then include film and television. After a number of years in the employ of film companies and networks I opted to leave the security of working for larger entities as I felt a need to gather my experiences thus far collected and pursue my individual interests and curiosities to then transform those findings into independently produced films and television programs, stories to be shared with others.

From that day on, I leveraged that particular inquisitiveness about places into a series for television entitled Sketches of Our Town. The work became a university of life, a broad study that allowed the opportunity to discover for me what makes a community and when we arrive in a place today, what are the telltale signs, the culture and traditions that reveal the makeup of identity. The early episodes focused on relatively accessible communities of Ontario. As audiences grew and along with them the range of television outlets that carried the series, within a short time of standing on the bridge of what I came to know as Millbrook Ontario, I found myself living out of a suitcase for a decade, exploring in every corner of the country.

I mention all of the above mainly because I now find myself reliving the experiences and memories of the people I met in over one hundred places across the country. In most recent weeks via YouTube, viewers from all over the country and abroad have began to share their personal connections to a place and I am gobsmacked by their bonds. In a time of restricted travel I invite you to travel with me, back to those places that have so much impassioned me to the richness of culture of our land.

It seems that the J.Frost Co. has sparked many a thought this morning. Maybe it’s the familiarity of a cold winter and a ring of normalcy that has returned me to iconic remembrances of the beauty of moments lived.

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