The sugar maple tree in our front yard is resplendent this week, something that prompted me to learn more about the species.

On the Canadian flag, for example:

Although many people think a red sugar maple leaf is featured on the flag of Canada, the official maple leaf does not belong to any particular maple species; although it perhaps most closely resembles a sugar maple leaf of all the maple species in Canada, the leaf on the flag was specially designed to be as identifiable as possible on a flag waving in the wind without regard to whether it resembled a particular species’ foliage.

There’s an interesting story about the making of the flag:

On a Friday afternoon in the late autumn of 1964, an urgent request came from Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson to the desk of Ken Donovan. Mr. Donovan was then an assistant purchasing director with the Canadian Government Exhibition Commission, which later became a part of the Department of Supply and Services.

The Prime Minister wanted prototypes of the proposals for the new flag to take to his new residence at Harrington Lake the next morning. The three proposals on the table included the single maple leaf design.

The only design samples in existence were drawings on paper. So Mr. Donovan and his team of designers managed to do the impossible. The flag prototypes were assembled in just a few hours. Graphic artists and silk screeners Jean Desrosiers and John Williams were called in to work on the Friday evening. Since no seamstress could be found, the flags were stitched together by the young Joan O’Malley, daughter of Ken Donovan.

The story bears more than a little in common with the story of the late Anne of Green Gables PEI license plate that I wrote about in 2007; from Baxter Ramsay, its designer:

“The next time I saw the Anne Plate it was done on a metal plate and all the mistakes were still there: her hair curls were wrong, door on the house in the wrong place along with the windows trees etc… I just did a fast sketch on ink and from memory (which was not very good) and sent it to motor vehicle. I said if it was to be used it needed to be corrected and made to fill in the plate more… Well what you see is what we got…”

I wonder how much of the design landscape is the result of processes like this, how much of what we assume was a long and deliberate process was, in fact, thrown together in a rush at the last minute.

Learning about cyanotype is learning about shadows and light, which is not one of my strong suits, so sometimes things I think are going to make an awesome print end up being an amorphous blob.

And then there are ferns. 

I honestly didn’t think I’d derive any pleasure from making prints of things from the natural world, but, boy oh boy, are ferns amazing. 

Taken at twilight from the porch at Beaconsfield while waiting for the monthly Pen & Pencil Club of Prince Edward Island meeting to start. A beautiful night.

Sarah Miller went to England, and experienced that dreadful “between arrival and hotel” time I’d forgotten about, what not having flown overseas in three years:

I arrived in London at 10 a.m. but couldn’t get into my hotel room until three. I realized this was standard and not a conspiracy against me. However, just because I was not at all surprised I’d have to wander around Clerkenwell for five hours looking and feeling like utter dogshit doesn’t mean I was pleased about it.

The first two or three days of a trip to Europe I generally feel like I’m in an uncomfortable dreamscape.

Ever since our friend Derrick visited mid-month bearing materials to make cyanotypes, I’ve been fascinated by the process. With the arrival of my own cyanotype chemicals late last week, I’ve dived back into experimenting, with hopes of combining cyanotype and letterpress. Today was my first try.

I started by picking some leaves from the sugar maple tree in front of our house (the tree is in peak foliage as I write, something that, in this case, is immaterial but for the fact that it will soon drop its leaves, making time of the essence):

I lay the leaves I picked on paper I’d painted a few days ago with the cyanotype chemicals, and set a pane of glass overtop:

I left them in the midday sunshine of my front stoop for 20 minutes, then brought them inside and rinsed them in the kitchen sink, changing the water a few times, for about five minutes, and then lay them out to dry. It’s this part of the process where the alchemy runs strongest.

Back in the print shop, I set SUGAR MAPLE in 120 point Akzidenz Grotesk:

A combination of impatience and wanting to try “printing damp,” which is a thing letterpress printers do, led me to print the cyanotype prints while they were, if not wet, at least soggy. The resulting impression was luscious compared to printing dry, and I’m very happy with the result:

I’ve been listening to a lot of Alison Krauss this week, especially her 2007 album A Hundred Miles or More.

It’s hard not to love an album that features duets with both Natalie MacMaster (Get Me Through December) and John Waite (Missing You).

Krauss and Waite’s Missing You is a straight cover of Waite’s 1984 original rather than the banjo-infused reinterpretation you might expect, and I’d argue it takes what started as a solid mid-1980s pop ballad and makes it better simply for Krauss’ presence.

(Also worthy of noting: it was lost on me, in the original listening on AM radio, that Waite actually is missing you, despite vehemently insisting he’s not; I guess I’ve learned that things are not always as they seem).

The MacMaster duet, Get Me Through December, is a different thing entirely, inasmuch as Krauss also provided the vocals on MacMaster‘s 1999 release on her own album, but it’s a lovely song nonetheless, and the 2007 version sounds both brighter and warmer, although I might simply be projecting.

It’s also interesting to listen to in the shadow of Phoebe Bridgers’ 2020 cover of If We Make It Through December, originally released in 1974 by Merle Haggard. But for the fact that Haggard died in 2016, wouldn’t a duet with Bridgers have been interesting.

Of course one can’t write about Alison Krauss collabs without mentioning Robert Plant, whose latest release together High and Lonesome arrived just two weeks ago and is an entirely new kind of delight.

With the release of iOS 15.1 today, you can now add your PEI Vax Pass to the Wallet app on your iPhone for easy access. As it’s not immediately obvious how to do this, here’s how:

1. From the My COVID-19 Proof of Vaccination page, get a copy of your PEI Vax Pass QR code and make a screen shot of it, saving the screen shot to Photos.

2. In the Photos app, open the screen shot, tap on the “recognize text” icon in the bottom right, and then tap on the QR code: you should see a “Open in Health” option pop up. Tap that.

3. Your vaccination record will be added to the Health App, and to your Apple Wallet.

That’s it.

Now when you need to show your PEI Vax Pass, double-tap on the home button to open your Wallet: it will be right there with any other credit cards, tickets, etc. you’ve added.

(from a helpful pointer from DNA Lounge—this all works because PEI, like many jurisdictions, is using the SMART Health standard for QR codes)

Realizing that autumn won’t be around forever, we drove out to Robinson’s Island today, in PEI National Park, to take a walk in the woods. 

The last time I was there must have been a long time ago, as it’s an island transformed: where there was once a campground, it’s now gone, and significant rewilding has taken place. 

The walking trail is well-marked and runs counter-clockwise to a mountain bike trail that shares the same trail, but runs clockwise, something that  seems, in theory—we didn’t encounter any bicycles—to be a good trail-sharing system. 

The late  David Graeber wrote about the way forward from here before he died. In part:

Because, in reality, the crisis we just experienced was waking from a dream, a confrontation with the actual reality of human life, which is that we are a collection of fragile beings taking care of one another, and that those who do the lion’s share of this care work that keeps us alive are overtaxed, underpaid, and daily humiliated, and that a very large proportion of the population don’t do anything at all but spin fantasies, extract rents, and generally get in the way of those who are making, fixing, moving, and transporting things, or tending to the needs of other living beings. It is imperative that we not slip back into a reality where all this makes some sort of inexplicable sense, the way senseless things so often do in dreams.

Sure, we all dream about it, borrowing an important ingredient, at an important time, from a neighbour. But how often does it actually happen?

For me, never. Until today. When I found myself without a teaspoon of “mixed spice” for a parkin. The merchants of Charlottetown were without, and while I could have made my own, I happened to run into my neighbour Andrea at the Bulk Barn yesterday, and she offered up some of hers.

The parkin is in the oven now.

Between neighbours who watched Olivia as a baby, neighbours who built me a driveway, and neighbours who fixed my canoe, I am blessed by the sandwich I find myself inside.