Sitting by the ocean on the western shore of Cape Breton. 

Blackberries are clearly at the top of the berry kingdom, and booking off this week, in this place, for this vacation was something I did, in no small way, because this is the week the blackberries ripen.

So every morning I go out to the garden, still wearing my smallclothes, to pick a bowl’s worth for breakfast.

This week we’ve traded in the gentle shores of one island for the monumental shores of another. The forecast calls for rain for every single day of our vacation, but that only serves to enhance the monumentality.

I Can’t Let Go ft. Tim Chaisson from The SIDH is a lovely song that heretofore escaped my attention.

This helpful website is a useful resource to understanding why we shouldn’t be patronizing Uline, they of the ubiquitous inch-thick catalogues of shipping supplies.

Bonus reason: your letter carrier with thank you.

Apparently my surname isn’t exotic enough, so they decided to add supplementary accents.

Sometimes Olivia has ideas. Outlandish ideas. Like “I’d like to have a jazz combo play my birthday gig” or “we need to only watch movies that family members watched while living in Ontario,” or “we need to make a musical about travel problems,” or “I need to organize a Zoom unconference of everyone I’ve ever met.”

Often I sigh when I hear these ideas, as I realize their inevitability, and realize that I will inevitably be required to executive produce them.

The thing is, when all is said and done, the ideas brought to life, the chips let fall where they may, they’re almost always awesome ideas.

Witness this weekend: months ago Olivia insisted that we needed to find a way of marking Catherine’s contribution to the 2012 edition of Art in the Open, a project she executed with Lori Joy Smith that saw them create a labyrinth in Connaught Square. At the same time she wanted to mark the anniversary or the rogue Type in the Open project I did the same year.

She was unwilling to take no for an answer, and unwilling to consider issues like “this is impossible.” Gnashing was had by all. Therapy appointments were devoted to coming up with a way to communicate the urgency of the issue to me.

Eventually Olivia came up with a tenable plan: we would do something at our house that involved some of the creatures that Catherine created for the labyrinth, along with a type-related interactive activity of some sort.

What we came up with was centred on the maple tree in front of our house: using wooden type I purchased a few weeks ago, I printed № 6 shipping tags with single letters, and we hung these letters on clothespins in the tree. Below and among the branches of the tree Olivia artfully organized the creatures.

We announced the rogue operation the day before. People came. In great numbers. New people. Old friends. Curious wanderers. It was, true to Olivia’s outlandish form, awesome.

This federal general election I’m proudly and enthusiastically voting Green, for Darcie Lanthier in Charlottetown.

I think you should vote Green too.

Here’s why.

Darcie Lanthier is the kind of person you want as a Member of Parliament: she’s smart, capable, deeply engaged with the issues of the day–housing, climate, reconciliation, education, democratic reform. She’s worked as a community organizer, she’s started and run businesses, she’s raised a family, she knows how to wield a hammer.

My esteem for Darcie has only grown in the 2 years since I first suggested you vote for her: she’s used her time well, both building housing, and strenuously advocating for the rights of tenants, while at the same time leading a burgeoning solar energy business. 

Darcie has an intuitive sense of social justice, and is, at her core, a compassionate person; she is running for Parliament not as a act of hubris, but because she feels an urgency to shine light on things that often escape attention on the calcified merry-go-round of status quo politics. And she does this with profound optimism, free from cynicism or rancour. 

Darcie is, quite simply, the most qualified candidate on the ballot.

And that’s why you should vote for her.

While the audio from Dragonflies Through Binoculars (Skydrop Studios) plays, a look up into the Victoria Row tree canopy:

Inside Sugar Shack (Louis-Charles Dionne):

Detail from Raising Rooms (Leah Garnett):

Detail from Structure (Nine Yards), twice by day, once by night:

Arrows in the forest. Not art. Or is it?

A print from a newly-arrived letterpress cut from Wood Type Customs in Romania. Look carefully and you’ll see its real-world counterpart in reflection.