In the thick of early-COVID grief-fog, I sought a much-needed achievement badge by contacting The Macphail Woods Ecological Forestry Project about its landscape consulting service.

Catherine had always been the sexton of our churchyard and, in a move to establish dominion, I thought I should get to know it, and perhaps plan for its future.

A few days later I was lucky to take MacPhail’s Gary Schneider on a tour of the backyard. To my surprise, rather than hitting me with a “you need to get some native plants in here stat” prescription, Gary, instead, led me on a much more philosophical conversation about what I wanted the yard to feel like, what I wanted to use it for. It was, it turns out, just what my soul needed.

On his way out the gate, Gary pointed at an outcropping of tall bamboo-like shoots between our deck and the fence.

“You probably want to do something about that,” Gary said, “and your neighbours will thank you if you do.”

Gary explained that what he was pointing at was Japanese knotweed, an invasive species that the PEI Invasive Species Council describes in dire terms:

Japanese knotweed is one of the Global Invasive Species Database’s 100 worst invaders. It grows in a wide variety of habitats and tolerates a wide range of adverse conditions such as deep shade, high temperatures, salinity, and drought. It grows in dense thickets that shade out neighbouring species and spreads readily via underground rhizomes. Once established, it generally takes great persistence and several years to eradicate. Japanese knotweed is widespread on PEI.

And thus began my descent into a kind of interspecies hell, me against knotweed, a battle that played out both in the soil and in my grief-burdened psychology, which didn’t really need a brooding subterranean foe to fuel its nightmares.

But I dove into the battle, grief or no (maybe it was exactly what I needed).

I consulted with my neighbours, with Gary, with Island Nature Trust, with the Invasive Species Council. I read horror stories from the UK where properties were rendered unsalable because of knotweed invading their foundations. I Googled and Googled and Googled.

I learned from my mother-in-law that Catherine, unbeknownst to me, had been quietly waging her own battle against the knotweed before she died, trying in vain to cut it back every spring.

The consensus: short of chemically poisoning the knotweed, which I wasn’t prepared to do, my best course of action was to remove as much of the knotweed as possible, as deep as possible, and then to cover the area with a thick black tarp, cover the tarp with several inches of soil, and then maintain vigilance.

“You just have to be diligent. If you don’t let it photosynthesize, it starves itself.”, Gary emailed.

So that’s what I did.

The first year the knotweed was tenacious, finding ways out from underneath the tarp every few weeks or so. I emailed my neighbour a month into the project:

I finally saw evidence of some serious knotweed on our side of the fence tonight, coming out from underneath the tarp-covered area right about the fence line. 

This wasn’t gentle young “shoots,” but ½ inch thick growths that worked their way under the tarp to daylight.

I was equally tenacious, pruning it back every time I saw a shoot. My neighbour did the same thing on her side.

Over the winter I updated Gary:

Over the course of the summer, in parallel to managing the knotweed, smothering it, but seeing its tenacious shoots, I engaged in a similar relationship with grief, eventually, in both cases, coming to a sort of symbiotic relationship. Both will be with me for a long time, but, with attention, I can avoid getting strangled.

The second year was about the same.

So was the third year.

Four years in, things had started to taper off: I was still seeing shoots here and there, but managing them was no longer a part-time job.

This year, 2026, six years on, is the first year that I’ve been able to declare a tentative victory: I’ve pulled out a determined shoot or two, but it does seem like, finally, the Japanese knotweed is “under control,” if not eliminated.

Along the way I’ve developed a second sight for knotweed: I see it everywhere in Charlottetown, especially along Confederation Trail. When it’s in full flush it can seem like it’s growing a foot a day and will eventually consume everything in its path.

While it seemed at times that thoughts of knotweed would plague my nightmares ceaselessly, as I’ve managed to keep it at bay in the back garden, my mind has quieted. Maybe I actually did need an external foe to act as a metaphor for grief, and perhaps the patience and tenacity I needed to fight the foe were qualities that needed a boost.

While it’s hard to be thankful to the knotweed itself—we are still mortal enemies—I am thankful to Gary for identifying it, for the distraction when I needed one, and for the path to victory when I needed a victory really badly.

StreetComplete, heretofore an Android-only app, is now in beta for iOS, and I’ve been using it, and enjoying using it, for the past few days.

StreetComplete is a “questing” app, with a goal of filling in missing details on OpenStreetMap, things like house numbers, business hours, and accessibility. 

In the screenshot above I was prompted to add the level above ground of Kent Street Market, and responded with “0”, as it’s on ground level.

There are many ways to edit OpenStreetMap: the web-based editor, dedicated tools like JOSM, mobile-focused tools like OsmAnd. Street Complete is different because it’s not primarily focused on editing the map itself, but rather metadata attached to things already mapped. It’s like Mechanical Turk, but you don’t get paid and the world benefits.

An unexpected delight at last night’s True Mountain Laurel gig at Trailside Music Hall was opening act Lia Pappas-Kemps. This is her song A Thousand Times Over, recorded from too far away; go find the real deal online for full fidelity.

Her opening few songs were reserved, but as she got going she opened right up, and by the time she joined True Mountain Laurel on stage for her new single I Want It Easy, she was there.

The leaves on the sugar maple tree are starting to turn in earnest.

I saw True Mountain Laurel at Trailside last night, and loved it. You should seek them out.

The group is singer-songwriters Haley Blais and Sam Lynch, formidable talents in their own right, who turn out to have a synergy when they write music together and perform it: they’re witty, relaxed, talented players, and, despite a too-small-for-such-greatness crowd last night, they managed to weave a scene out of the evening.

If you can’t see them live, find their debut album Angel So Bad. My favourite track on the album is I Love You, Nicole, the inspiration for which was their shared middle name.

Three interesting creative people interviewed by curious interviewers, each worth a listen:

• Bjarke Ingels
• Sylvester Stallone
• Aaron Sorkin

The mobile app for GoodLife Fitness has charts for each day of the week showing how busy the gym is. I grabbed the charts for Charlottetown and animated them by way of understanding the flow from day to day, and the differences between weekends and weekdays.

In making the animated GIF I discovered a very helpful feature of Graphic Converter, my go-to Swiss Army knife for image editing: if you want to crop a bunch of images exactly the same way, open them all, crop one, and then select Edit > Crop all open Images with Last Values.

I grew up in the small village of Carlisle, Ontario. While it’s not like I grew up on a remote farm, or in the wilderness, during the years before I was able to drive it felt like the ends of the Earth.

Fortunately, by lucky happenstance, there was a Canada Coach Lines bus to Hamilton that stopped directly in front of our house on Progreston Road, twice a day, a lifeline to the pleasures of the city that my brothers and I took maximum advantage of. 

When that bus schedule didn’t line up, the alternate way into the city was to have Mom or Dad drop us off on Plains Road in Aldershot, in front of Murray’s Variety, where we could catch the GO Bus into downtown Hamilton.

I’m thinking of this right now because I’m on the bus to Morell, my first trip on PEI’s rural public transit system. I’ve got my folding bicycle with me, and when I arrive in Morell I’ll unfold it and ride the 30 minutes to our place by the shore. Later in the afternoon Lisa will drive out to meet me. The trip, like all rural transit on PEI, cost me $2.

I love public transit, and I’m encouraged by how it’s slowly but surely becoming a thing here on the Island.

It will take a generation, I think.

For young L., age 15, transit is second nature, and she thinks nothing of hopping on a bus to flit around the city.

It makes little economic nor environmental sense for this bus to be carrying only two of us to the north shore—me plus a fellow going out to Wyman’s in Canavoy. But it represents the patience that’s needed to give transit the chance to marinate, for the word to spread, for whatever social stigma is associated with transit to die off. Holding onto this takes political will at budget time, and I’m happy that, so far, that will has held.

There’s a certain anxiety that’s accompanied every single bus ride I’ve ever taken, from age 12 onward. Will the bus arrive? Will it be the right bus? Will I have the right change for the bus fare? What if I miss my stop? The only way through this requires a ceding of control, a suspension of disbelief (it’s why cars have such an advantage, with the extra agency they offer, despite their myriad other negatives).

I remember waiting on a desolate side street in Mestre—the mainland side of Venice—with Catherine and Olivia in 2010. We had tickets for the bus to Ljubljana, a bus that had started its trip in Florence and would finish it in Sofia. We weren’t entirely sure we were at the right stop. The bus was very very late. It was cold, getting dark. And yet eventually the bus arrived, and we had a wonderful journey with our mostly-Bulgarian fellow travellers.

I think of that trip often, and I use it as a way to remember that, in matters transit, things generally work out. And even when they don’t it’s an adventure.

My pre-trip anxieties today were several.

Would I be allowed to take my folding bicycle on the bus? (Yes. They don’t have provision for full-sized bikes, but they were happy to carry mine; I phoned ahead to confirm).

Was I too late to book a seat? (Yes, then no. Online you need to book an hour in advance; on the phone, though, I was able to book 30 minutes before departure).

Did I have the right bus stop? (No, then yes. The bus to St. Peters leaves from Queen Street by the Confederation Centre box office; I’d originally assumed it was around the corner).

Once underway the bus, brand new, developed a horrible-sounding squeal, requiring the driver to pull over on the edge of town for some diagnosing and consultation with base. It was decided we could continue, and after a few kilometres the noise went away (“stone in the brakes” was the diagnosis from my Wyman’s bus-mate).

Twenty-five minutes later I was dropped at the Morell Coop. I cycled over to the Dreadnaught for lunch, and then to the shore, just under 7 km in all.

And I feel like I have a new teleportational superpower. And a greater sense of nimble energy than a car has ever given me.

You had me at “retro Balkan pop music night.”

Sending an email to myself with Siri.