In the game of grief, I’ve had a special bonus round as I’ve worked to clean up Catherine’s studio, across the hall from my own shop, over the last ten months.

St. Paul’s Anglican Church has been extraordinarily patient with me, for which I will be forever grateful; as recently as a month ago the studio looked like a slightly reordered version of how it was when Catherine last shut the lights and closed the door. It was an overwhelming task, and I was overwhelmed; deadlines I set for myself — March 31, September 30 — came and went, and I couldn’t find the motivation to just deal with the everything of it all.

While there was, indeed, the practical challenge of simply dealing with unravelling the materials and supplies accumulated over a lifetime of art practice, lurking in the background was the larger spiritual challenge of what amounted to erasing tangible evidence of Catherine. I wasn’t fully aware of just how much of the daunting quality of the task was daunting because of that until this morning, as I made the last push to the summit.

The summit, it turns out, is a lonely place, and the prize for playing the bonus round is a physical manifestation of the emptiness that Catherine’s absence has left.

I confront the emptiness with equal parts melancholy and hope; as I wrote my family yesterday, “What I can feel happening slowly, sometimes very slowly, is the start of the end of the time of my life where I am defined by Catherine’s absence and instead am focused on other things. Future things.” Reaching the summit of emptiness is an important way station, a necessary one. I don’t want to stay here too long, but I do have to stay here for awhile.

I first met Lucy Morkunas in the most in-passing way that one can: in the chaos of the summertime Charlottetown Farmers’ Market she stopped me, introduced herself, and told me I had to meet her friend Kent, who was in town from Ontario; she thought we’d get on (we did meet, several times, and did, indeed, have overlapping sensibilities).

Earlier this year I heard from a mutual friend that Lucy had been diagnosed with collecting duct carcinoma, a rare form of kidney cancer. Knowing that we’d already met, and that I’d some recent familiarity with life, cancer, dying, and death, our mutual friend suggested I might reach out. I did, and the result was a visit to Lucy’s home this summer bearing sandwiches from town.

If you read The Guardian, you might recognize Lucy’s name from the article P.E.I. woman forced to pay for cancer drug already on provincial formulary that ran in the paper on Monday: since that summertime sandwich Lucy and I shared, she’d started and stopped chemotherapy (because it wasn’t working), and has started taking Nivolumab, an immunotherapy that, in her case, has shown great promise.

The problem Lucy’s running into–and the reason for the article in The Guardian–is that the treatment’s costs aren’t being covered by provincial medicare, leaving her to pay the $7,000 per dose cost out of her own pocket. Lucy’s request to Health PEI to cover the cost was met with the response that it “is not in alignment with the criteria and therefore is not eligible for funding at this time.”

I had lunch with Lucy again today.

It was clear that as much as she is, understandably, concerned about getting her treatment funded, she is concerned about the opacity of Health PEI’s response: she wants to know what the criteria are, and why her situation is not in alignment with them.

She wants this for herself, but also, equally wants it for the rest of us who may one day walk down this road. Living with cancer is hard enough without having to run a part-time advocacy and logistics operation on the side, and Lucy is simply advocating for a process that is clear and transparent.

Catherine was fortunate that the treatments for her metastatic breast cancer were all covered 100% by medicare; we were never faced with having to lobby health officials for medication that could keep her alive.

Cancer care is a labyrinth, and Lucy is the first to admit that there are dead ends, points at which treatment must come to an end. What she simply wants to know–and what I think we, in whose name her treatment might be funded, should want to know–is what the rules are and how the decisions are made. We owe Lucy that. We owe ourselves that.

The Antarctic Extremes series from PBS is well-produced and entertaining.

I woke up this morning determined to, well, not particularly determined to do anything of great import. But, as the day progressed, I decided that today was the day to open an online store for my letterpress goods.

It’s been a whirlwind effort, but I’ve done it, and it’s open now for your shopping convenience at:

https://shop.QueenSquarePress.ca/

To get to this point, here’s what I did today:

1. Came up with a new name for my press. I’d been using “Reinvented Press,” named after my digital business, by default over the years, but I was never happy about it: the press needed a name of its own. Given that I live and work on Queen Square, Queen Square Press seemed like the right name (a few years ago, after talking to historians and doing some of my own research, I came to the conclusion that Queen, singular, is the proper name of the square).
2. Registered “Queen Square Press” as a trade name for Reinvented Inc. This required, first, a name reservation ($50) and, once I was cleared to use the name, a $90 registration fee. I was very impressed with the turnaround time on both, and I was able to self-service the entire thing on the provincial government’s website.
3. Registered the domain name QueenSquarePress.ca with Webnames.ca, for $13.99 a year.
4. Signed up for a Big Cartel account.
5. Set up DNS for shop.queensquarepress.ca to point to my new Big Cartel site.
6. Took photos, created products, wrote descriptions, set prices, set up shipping.
7. Upgrade from the free 5-product Big Cartel plan to the $9.99/month plan so that I could do inventory tracking and sell more than 5 products.
8. Launched the shop.

I like Big Cartel: it’s everything you need, and not a single bit more. It’s simpler than Shopify and considerably less chaotic (and with a different business model) than Etsy. It suits me.

The photos aren’t perfect. Not all the things I plan to sell are in place. I might lose money on the shipping. But launching an imperfect shop, in a day, was a better plan than never launching a perfect shop, over a lifetime. Thank you to the excellent Expedition Press, from whom I just purchased a whack of beautiful things, for the inspiration.

Enjoy.

I’m down to the last few things to find new homes for in Catherine’s studio, the large, unwieldy things that don’t have a self-evident destination.

Maybe the destination is you? I’ll happily give any of the following away to anyone who will provide a good home.

Please let me know. Local pickup in Charlottetown only.

Walking Spinning Wheel TAKEN

This is giant (the wheel itself has a diameter of 4 feet) spinning wheel, also know as a great wheel.

The great wheel was one of the earlier types of spinning wheel. The fibre is held in the left hand and the wheel slowly turned with the right. This wheel is thus good for using the long-draw spinning technique, which requires only one active hand most of the time, thus freeing a hand to turn the wheel. The great wheel is usually used to spin short-staple fibres (this includes both cotton and wool), and can only be used with fibre preparations that are suited to long-draw spinning

It’s not feature-complete — the smaller fiddly bits are missing — but in the right hands it could spin again. Or make an addition to your collection of Canadiana.

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Yarn Winder TAKEN

Whenever I didn’t know what a particular piece of her fibre equipment was called, I’d call it a “niddy noddy.” Which is an actual piece of equipment. This is not a niddy noddy, it’s a wooden yarn winder. It winds yarn. One of the “arms” is coming unglued and needs some repair, but it turns well.

Wooden Stands TAKEN

Catherine used these looping or wrapping or hanging or some such fibre gymnastics. If you’re in the market for some flexible things that might become room-dividers, these might be for you.

Tapestry Loom

From Catherine’s mother: “the tapestry frame can be used for embroidery or any needle work to stretch the fabric and then work on.”

Boot Jack TAKEN

From Catherine’s mother:

The two loops at the end is a boot jack. It used to be on our mud room. Hold the big hoop up right and use the bottom loop to pull your boots off. No messy fingers.

Our Sunday drive this week was to Montague, and a first visit to The Lucky Bean Café on Main Street.

We’d been in the building before, back in the days when it was more french fries than flat whites; in its new incarnation it’s gone full-on third wave. I had a solid coffee, Oliver a solid London Fog.

We came back to town the long way, via Caledonia (and its sparkling new roundabout), Wood Islands (where we topped up the EV), and Brush Wharf Provincial Park (which doesn’t actually exist; more on that later).

The weather was a warm 9°C all afternoon, and it was bright and sunny (although the switch off of daylight savings time meant it got dark at 5:00 p.m.).

While it wasn’t quite the last flight out of Saigon, I just heard the last scheduled WestJet for Toronto, Boeing 737 C-GQWJ, rumble into the sky.

While we’re still connected to Canada by the one daily flight to each of Toronto and Montréal on Air Canada, WestJet’s pullout does reinforce the “cut off from the rest” feeling of living on this Island, in both the negative and positive senses.

I saw the original Star Trek: The Motion Picture at a matinee with my father in San Antonio, Texas in 1980; even though it was 40 years ago, I remember the experience palpably, no part of it more so than the sequence where the new Enterprise, in dry dock, is revealed to Kirk:

To my fourteen year old self, this modern-day rebirth of the Star Trek franchise was absolutely alluring, filled with hope and promise of an exciting future. And, perhaps because of that, the Enterprise-in-dry-dock image has stayed with me as a larger metaphor all these years, a metaphor I return to often.

Halloween was last night, but Halloween, in our family, started a week ago, on day one of Oliver’s self-declared week-of-costumes.

On Sunday he was dressed like me:

Monday is was “sporty person,” Tuesday it was Alexander Graham Bell:

Wednesday it was “Friend on a Date” (two versions: male in the morning, female in the afternoon–which led to me receiving a panicked SMS “Help stuck in boobs” during the dry run).

Thursday was “Poor Victorian” (in honour of his History of Britain lecture); he’s frowning because, apparently, people always frowned in photographs during the Victorian era, or at least they never smiled:

Friday morning it was “Friends character from the 1990s”:

Friday evening he dressed, for Family Zoom, like his great-great-great-grandfather, in a fedora (pro tip: H&M at the mall sells fedoras, should you ever need one on short notice). Saturday he was dressed like the Premier of PEI:

Oliver, I have learned, takes particular comfort in Maximum Celebration.

I’ve always known this, of course, having been his father for 20 years; but single-parent-me experiences this more directly, especially as Catherine was often always parent-in-charge of such celebrations (witness her once dressing as a clown for a his birthday while I looked on).

I’ve come to think of this comfort as offering a sort of emotional dry dock for Oliver, a latticework to which he can tether himself, a grounding point in a seemingly magical, random world.

It isn’t always easy to be on Oliver’s pit crew during celebration season: what emerges, later, as comfort, is often forged in difficult “you don’t understand me”-style communication battles and seemingly endless scavenger hunts (“Victorian style underwear” was a hard one).

And I do have a “this would be a lot easier if…” internal dialogue running a lot of the time.

But you gotta take comfort where comfort manifests, and if that means dressing up like Alexander Graham Bell or Dennis King, well, you meet it at that front door.

Oliver’s found a dry dock that works, and he’s becoming better at owning that, advocating for himself, and installing his own grappling hooks. Once the welding is finished, and the comfort settles in, it is a sight to behold.

Mandy Patinkin gives a shit.

We traditionally receive approximately two kids every Halloween, living in the city’s seedy underbelly as we do. But were prepared, with local treats, hand sanitizer, traffic cones and a complicated rig to reverse-project Charlie Brown & The Great Pumpkin out the front window.

Postscript: we did, indeed, get our assigned quota of two kids. Young L. dropped by early, with his well-consumed family along; we thought he might be it, but at the last moment a young witch dropped by.