Hello again, on this fine Wednesday morning…
I’m sitting here sipping tea, trying to gather the motivation to get something done.
Anything…
I got the girl off to school and now have started the fire so perhaps by bedtime my house might be warm. It’s been a few weeks since my furnace fuel ran out and I’m waiting for the rest of the snow to go and the frozen earth to thaw and re-solidify before I can call the oil company to send a truck. There’s no chance they could get up my hill yet.
As much as it is a modern inconvenience, I’m kind of loving the dependence on wood heat to warm me up. It’s always cold in the morning, but there is an old fashioned charm to it and it makes me feel like I really do live in the country, which I do.
It was pretty lovely last week, sitting out on my deck sipping my coffee in early-summer weather and it really got our hopes up that winter was over. Of course, there is always one more storm (at least) at that point which decided to come yesterday. The landscape is once again white and black with miniscule touches of red where the PEI earth shows through.
Tomorrow I will be heading out of winter directly into the BC spring where it should rain non-stop. This time we are heading out just for a west coast music conference and not playing any proper shows. It’s a long way to travel, from far east to far west, just to play 20 minutes in hopes of future work, but that’s the glamorous ridiculous life I’m leading, I guess.
Perhaps, by the time we get home, spring will have really stuck here in PEI. You just never really know. And upon return, I get to play with one of my local heroes, Mitch Schurman, at the newly re-opened Trailside in Mt Stewart, PE. It’ll be exciting to see how one of my favourite PEI venues has changed under the new ownership of some of Charlottetown’s greatest, young entrepreneurs and music lovers.
Last night I went to bed reading “The Good Life” by Helen and Scott Nearing, the grand-parents of the back-to-the-land movement. They moved out of NYC to Vermont in the 30’s to find a better life, one not based on profit but on time well spent. I devoured the whole chapter on their Vermont gardening techniques in one go and it kept me up for ages before I finally succumbed to sleep. I am so thrilled to start my garden again this year, and we only have to wait for the weather to change. It does (or did) seem like an early spring might be ours this year… early for PEI, I mean. Not Toronto or England or Spain. I am ok with that. Really. Mostly.
Anyway… off I go to work. The fire is kicking in now and my tea cup needs replenishing.
Thanks for the continued support.
Catherine
Hello Catherine,
I enjoyed your performance friday evening 18 may at Spijkerboor, a very little village in Holland. Your voice is so beautyfull. I`ve never heard about you before, but mostly the music in Spijkerboor is
suprisingly nice. [ A lot of canadian [folk] singers are performing over here!! ] My name is Fred Wink, married and we have 3 children in the age of 15, 17 and 18 years old.
At home I started te read your weblog story`s and I enyed to read about your gardeing en growing your owne vegetabels. That`s one of mine things I like to do. But since 5 years I stopped because we moved to a new house, and the garden is to small. The other house was a small house with a big garden, and now we have a big house in the city with a small garden. But it was good to work with the hands in the soil and see things grow. The story`s that you write about your house on the isle of prince Edward, its giving a fine image. I really think it`s a fine place to live!!
if you like I can send you some packages with seed of a vegetable we love to eat in Holland. Its called in dutch: Boerenkool,.
Catherine
Miss Lindsay Johnston is moving out to BC to do a Masters in Nursing and Nurse Pract program at U of BC in September. If you need a place to crash I know that she would love to see you and your beautiful daughter. She has her own apartment in a very nice part of Vancouver.
mARY