Andrea Mulder-Slater

by: Andrea Mulder-Slater I've never been much of a camper - a fact that has been clear since the day I proclaimed, “I am not a camper.” I was five. From that moment on, my father (a man whose idea of camping involved steak and hermetically sealed trailers) and I shared a special bond. My mother on the other hand, feels right at home in the wilderness, which is why she was thrilled and secretly amused, when I married… a true camper. My husband is a human being who can travel on foot, a few hundred kilometers, through dense bush, carrying a mobile home in his backpack. He can sense the presence of an injured animal, stop and lead a lost bear cub back to his mother, prepare a meatball stew, and record the moment in a watercolor sketch, all the while facing North. Me, I prefer the comfort and safety of a sleeping park with hot showers, streetlights and an all night snack bar. Because my father and I usually won any family argument, any family camping trips took place not in

by: Andrea Mulder-Slater I have a love-hate relationship with my hair. I always have and I suspect, after recently discovering various shades of green at the nape of my neck, I always will. I’m quite certain it all began at the age of twelve; for it was then that I discovered, by accident… the home permanent kit. You see, my cousin Margaret had just enrolled in beauty school - a place I thought must certainly be horrific, given the devices that often fell out of her knapsack. Yet in spite of my mother’s gentle warnings, I offered to donate my head – temporarily – to the cause, mostly because at twelve, quite frankly, I had no real concept of what it meant to look good. In fact, rummaging through old family photographs, one might assume that I grew up in a house without mirrors, or reflective surfaces of any kind. It may have been the eighties but I know now that there is no excuse for a pre-teen girl to be wearing pre-owned brown tweed suit jackets. Back to the hair and the day w