Jean-Paul Arsenault, one of the smartest minds on Prince Edward Island on matters concerning the environment and land, and an incisive writer, published the best take I’ve read in the Gilles Arsenault affair.

He begins:

I was born and raised in downtown Wellington in the house my grandfather built in 1914 on a wetland beside the Ellis River, and I lived there with my young family until 1990. Much of Wellington lies on what is now defined in the law as either “wetland” or watercourse “buffer zone”.

I received some lovely birthday gifts, including a beautiful typewriter print, a fetching T-shirt from Portugal, a tiny printing press, and a yellow rollerball pen.

By far and away the best gift of all came yesterday, in the gym, when, on hearing I’d just turned 60, one of the coaches, just finishing up his own spicy workout, said, matter-of-factly:

You don’t look it.

To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with “looking 60,” and I find myself embracing aging more than rejecting it. 

I take the compliment, whether intended as such or not, as “you’re not giving up.”

No, I’m not giving up.

Here’s how the house I grew up in, from ages 6 to 18, appeared on Google Maps in 2023. My house is the one of the left, the simple two-storey house with dormers; to its right is a new house going up behind it.

Here’s how the house looked—or rather didn’t look, as it was gone—when I drove by last week:

My boyhood home is gone, replaced with a garage for the new house.

My boyhood driveway, my boyhood trees, the boyhood shed where our dog Jake used to sleep at night, they are all still there.

My therapist, who is a spiritual man, suggested that it’s not a coincidence that I happened to drive by the house and discover this now, at a time in my life when I’m evermore grappling with the relationship of my childhood to my adulthood.

My friend Yvonne, who I’ve known since we were in our early 20s, sent me a lovely birthday card, and enclosed this photo. It was taken sometime in the early 1990s on the shore of Moosehorn Lake, just outside of Halifax.

I was so young. And so long-haired!

Our morning walks started on March 8 when the sunrise was at 7:39 a.m. Today, 20 days later, the sun rose at 6:59 a.m., breaking through a psychological barrier between winter and spring.

There’s still a little ice in Charlottetown Harbour, but it’s more a “sheen” than an ice pack. The sunrise reflecting on the sheen was beautiful.

Tomorrow is our last sunrise walk of this season of British Summer Time walks; we’ll gain an additional 2 minutes, with sunrise at 6:57 a.m.

The first crocuses of the year appeared in the front garden at 100 Prince Street on Thursday, March 26, later than they have in the past 5 years.

See also 2020 (March 24), 2021 (March 12), 2022 (March 18), 2023 (March 20), 2024 (March 14), and 2025 (March 14).

The track Coma / Smoke, from Hailaker’s 2019 self-titled album, has been on frequent rotation here since I discovered it a few weeks ago.

On first listening I texted Lisa:

There’s a lot to love about this song. It’s a journey. 

And it is: up and down and around, intense and sparse. I love it.

I once sent Annie Mueller a note about how it seemed like she was listening to our lives and writing helpful essays to support us. It’s happened many times.

This morning on our British Summer Time walk, Lisa was leaning hard into ignoring traffic lights. I accused her of being a rule-follower, except in this glaring case.

(I am a rule follower; in this particular case I have Olle’s words to me in mind, about Copenhagen traffic, from years ago: “When the rules are ignored, people die.” I realize as I write this that I may have conflated Olle and Jack Nicholson.)

Coming back home, I found this in my feeds:

Break dumb rules. Break arbitrary small rules (or don’t). Break rules that exist only to create convenience for one group of people. Break rules that are immoral even if they’re not illegal. Whenever you can, break rules that exist only to uphold a system. It’s important.

Don’t break the rules that define who you are…

…Unless that’s not who you want to be anymore.

In addition to marking Lisa in the right (traffic lights sacrifice pedestrians for the convenience of cars), Mueller’s words are helpful in a larger therapeutic way: they hit me square in the middle of a “maybe this isn’t who I want to be anymore” phase. 

Keep listening, please.

I spent a good part of the day in the print shop working on a two-colour job, the second colour being Flame Red. It’s an ornery ink that’s hard to clean, so I don’t use it often. 

Having finished the 9 copies of the main job, I decided to blow off some steam by using the ink I was about to have to clean. Turns out I needed a good dose of transgression today, and this helped.

The letters are from the “odd wood type” drawer and have come to me in different ways. It’s not like me to embrace such “chaos,” but when you’re printing fuck, well, fuck.