I’m a fairly regular customer at Samuel’s Coffee House in Summerside, so felt bold enough last week to ask one of the staff if they ever considered adding cortados to their lineup. I fairly squealed with delight when she said they did make cortados, but it never made it onto their menu board, although they do have a button for it on their cash system. They don’t use little glasses like Receiver Coffee in Charlottetown, and I feel it’s a slightly bigger drink than Receivers, but it is completely delicious all the same. I’m not sure why I didn’t ask about it before, but the coffee drink you need will emerge when you are ready for it!
So now you know the secret, too, and are a Samuel’s insider. Tell them Thelma sent you.
Today two Miꞌkmaq porcupine quill artists, Kayla and Noella, harvested white birch bark from the trees in the forest where I live. Kayla is one of the Epekwitk Quill Sisters, with Cheryl, and I’ve been listening to their podcast since it started in May. It was wonderful to meet Kayla and see Noella again, as I took a quilling workshop with her on Lennox Island First Nation a few years ago.
They have mentioned in the podcast that it can feel unsafe to harvest birch bark in public places, that non-indigenous people can harass birch bark harvesters, so I told Cheryl and Kayla about the birch trees around our house. I was happy they could get some big, beautiful pieces of bark, which is used as the base of their artwork. They may return to harvest cedar and spruce roots, too, and will be back for more bark in future years. The trees will heal over the next few years, and then can be harvested again in 15-20 years, perhaps by Kayla and Noella’s children or grandchildren.
They told me that bark harvesting can only be done for a few weeks in the summer, after the trees have drawn up nutrients from the ground in the spring. Harvesters know the bark is ready when fireflies appear, though this is starting to be a less reliable indicator than it once was due to climate change. I got to pull a piece of bark off a tree, and it felt like damp leather. The tree didn’t bleed because the cuts don’t go deep enough to hit the tree’s vascular system. The cracking sound was unlike anything else I’ve ever heard.
While I was watching them harvest, I picked wild strawberries, wild raspberries and the first blueberries I’ve seen this season. The forest is full of traditional foods and medicine.
Some of the birch trees in the forest now look a little different, but this is Miꞌkmaꞌki, and this is what the landscape should look like. Now if you see a tree that has been properly harvested in a public place, you will know it is not vandalism – it is anti-colonialism, it is culture, it is resilience .
Have a listen to the Epekwitk Quill Sisters, especially the episode about harvesting birch bark and a very moving episode about family.
Harvested trees
Lots of bark to be shared with other quillersNo harm done
Last time I bought paint, the clerk gave me a can opener.
Today when putting painting supplies away, I noticed this tool is also a paint can closer.
I assumed the flat end was the opener (which it is) and the other end was a bottle opener, for whatever reason in the 21st century when hardly any bottle cap needs to be pried off. Turns out the bottle opener part is for pushing down the can lid, using the sticking-out part as a lever. It works ok – probably really well on an unused can of paint – but I was dealing with a 19-year-old can, so a rubber mallet was more effective to get a good seal.
http://www.anthonyco.com/paintcanopeners.php
How to keep paint usable for two decades? Seal the can as tightly as possible, probably with a rubber mallet and not the closing tool, then turn the can upside down and store in a cool, dry area. The paint seals the lid completely. It will thicken over time, and can get sort of weird, but just strain it through cheesecloth or old pantyhose and you might be able to paint over a patch in a wall, as I just did. I bought what I thought was pricey paint for the inside of our house in 2002, and it still looks fresh and the leftover paint pretty much still matches after all these years.
One last tip: when you first invert that sealed paint can, put it in a cardboard box for a few hours to test that the lid is firmly attached and not leaking. Paint spilled all over your shelf and/or floor is the mistake I made so you don’t have to!
I searched the Miele Canada website for a replacement part for our S7000 upright vacuum cleaner. They didn’t what I needed, but they do have 3D4U, a series of 3D printing files that anyone can download from Thingiverse. These are accessories rather than spare parts: an attachment to vacuum dust while you drill a hole, smaller-than-normal nozzle attachments for cleaning, a coffee bag clip that lets you add a pouring nozzle to your bag of beans, even an attachment to help you blow soap bubbles with your vacuum!
Miele say they are the first domestic appliance manufacturer to offer 3D printing accessories. That’s a great first step, and here’s hoping Miele and all other manufacturers of everything start making free 3D printing files of their spare parts available, especially for people like me who prefer to fix things when I can to keep as much as possible out the waste stream.
It’s impossible for companies to keep every part of every machine they have ever made in stock, but they could easily make the 3D printing files available. How many small appliances get tossed every year because a knob breaks or a little part cracks? I had to toss a stick blender last year only because a cheap plastic gear stripped after a few years of occasional use. I don’t own a 3D printer, but our public library system has some available, and perhaps printing kiosks could be a small business in future (if they aren’t already).
Canadian purveyors of incredibly tempting woodworking and gardening stuff, Lee Valley, just emailed a link to plans for a clever tool rack designed by former store employee Charles Mak. With a free PDF of the detailed plans and lots of helpful photos, this should be something even I can make with my limited shop tools and rough carpentry skills.
My great-great-grandparents were Martha (Ellis) and George Washington Sharp. They had 10 children, including one set of twins, my great-grandmother Eva and her sister, Florence.
It was only this evening that I realised Martha and George had three little girls who died within a few days of each other. They also had two boys aged 7 and 2 who survived. They went on to have five more children.
I had no idea what the girls died from, but I just found a death notice for the three little girls in the December 20, 1875 The Examiner newspaper out of Charlottetown. What unbearable pain.
I am slowly reading Wilding by Isabella Tree, an account of her family’s revolutionary transformation of the grounds of their English stately home from intensive farming to a wild natural landscape. The chapter I just finished saw them visit the Oostvaardersplassen in the Netherlands to see how grazing animals were used to manage and improve the nature reserve.
Cattle, ponies and deer are allowed to graze freely at the Oostvaardersplassen, and the original idea was for the animals to be allowed to live and die as they would without human intervention. Some people were appalled at the sight of sick and dying animals, so a compromise was made that ailing cattle and ponies would be euthanized and their bodies incinerated, but the deer would be allowed to die naturally, their carcasses feeding foxes, birds and rodents, insects and bacteria, and the bones breaking down to release valuable nutrients into the soil.
When I think of my impact on the planet in my 54 years of being a consumer, the thoughtless way I have bought and discarded endless things, I am overwhelmed with the notion that in my infinitesimal amount of time on the planet, I have probably left behind more garbage than all the animals and birds and fish and insects that ever lived combined. Those creatures created nothing that would last forever, whereas I have purchased and tossed away thousands of pounds of plastic and metal that will probably never really disappear. I am simultaneously the most power creature in hundreds of millions of years and the most foolish.
I had the option to do good things with my life, to make good choices, and I chose to spend part of it creating a lasting legacy of greed and thoughtlessness, the sleepwalking loop of shopping and discarding, over and over. I think about this a lot. I wonder how I can do better now that I know better, and how can I make up for my past.
I can hear birds chirping their goodnight songs right now, the robins telling me about their day and their wishes for tomorrow, free of possessions beyond a temporary nest that will eventually dissolve back into the ground, and free of the shame of leaving behind things that never really mattered in the first place. Free to sing.
I took my mother to visit a friend of ours on an extremely windy day last week, and our journey allowed us a brief glimpse of the ocean surf pounding against the Sandhills, the barrier sand dunes the protect our coastline at this end of PEI. It was a dramatic sight, and my mother said, “That’s what they used to call a trap smasher.”
I didn’t remember hearing that phrase before, but it makes sense, as those kinds of roiling seas will tangle lobster gear and can certainly end up smashing lobster traps. T.K. Pratt’s Dictionary of Prince Edward Island English includes “trap smasher”, saying it’s a noun frequent in Egmont (the federal electoral riding where we live) and is:
In lobster fishing, a severe wind storm during the fishing season.
So, technically, trap smashers can only occur along our section of the north side of PEI between May 1 and June 30, the spring lobster fishing season here. We, of course, ignore and never discuss the weather the other 10 months of the year (lol!).
My father and I bringing in unsmashed lobster traps circa 1980.
My mother attended her Women’s Institute’s annual meeting last evening, and they decided to disband after 99 years of continuous service. My mother joined in 1942 when she was 20, right before she enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force Women’s Division for service during the Second World War. She has loved being a WI member.
I think at one time almost every school district on PEI had a Women’s Institute to support the school and community, and pretty much every rural community had a one-room school, so that was a lot of WI groups. They were both a fundraising group and a social outing at a time when most rural woman were working at home. They would fundraise to keep their school in tip-top shape, and when consolidation in the 1960s and 70s closed small rural schools, many WIs bought the buildings from the government for a dollar and turned them into community halls. There were at least 22 WIs in our area, but that number has slowly dwindled and now 2 remain, Poplar Grove/McNeills Mills and Port Hill.
I never joined the WI. I was too young when I left for university, and when I moved back 20 years ago, there were no members my age, so I just didn’t join. I now feel like I have missed out on something important.
But I fondly remember the WI meetings that were held in our home when I was a child. I would sit in the corner and watch and listen to it all, the reports from the different committees, the education program on different topics of interest to country women, the discussions on what fundraiser they would hold next: a goose supper, a variety concert, make a quilt and sell raffle tickets on it, a bake sale. There was always tea and sandwiches and sweets and lots of chitchat after the meeting ended. It was up to the hostess to make “the lunch”, and my mother was a generous and excellent cook, so it was always a good feed! I would pass the plates of sandwiches from great aunt to great aunt to neighbour to cousin, all of them calling me “Thelma dear”, smiling, laughing. They would discuss who was sick and who had died and who was taking a trip, the price of things nowadays, wasn’t it hot/cold/mild/windy/dry/rainy.
The WIs in our district banded together to prepare and serve the suppers at the Tyne Valley Oyster Festival for many years, working out of a less-than-ideal kitchen attached to the old rink. They turned out beautiful lobster suppers, complete with salads, rolls, pies and sweets. It was thrilling to be in the midst of this cyclone of competence and energy, each woman knowing exactly what to do, working quickly as if they were line cooks every day of their life (which in some cases, with the large families that were once the norm here, they were), but almost always in good cheer and with a buzzing sense of unity and camaraderie. I feel fortunate to have learned so much from these resourceful, powerful women.
I texted a friend who is a member of one of the two remaining WIs in our area and asked if my mother could join them, even if just in an honorary way. “In a heartbeat,” she texted back.
Report on a WI meeting held at my great-grandparents’ lobster cannery from The Charlottetown Guardian, September 3, 1927. My mother went to live with her grandparents in the spring of 1927, and would have turned 5 that August, so she was likely present for this meeting, lurking at the edge of it like I used to do.
The Steven Mayoff Film Festival opened with Steven’s second film, Happy Birthday to Me, so it had to end with his first and only other film appearance to date, Hog Wild. It stars Tony Rosato of SCTV fame. It is a terrible movie. And although he appears in the credits as “Chubby Cadet”, Steven was actually nowhere to be seen! It could have been him in a bathrobe in a hallway near the beginning, but he can’t remember, and it was such a brief shot it was difficult to tell. I watched the whole thing to see if he would appear, but no Steven.
Real Professional Actor Matt Craven was also in both of those illustrious movies, so that’s something, I guess. Craven was also in the single-season TV series L.A. Doctors with my NTS classmate, Rick Roberts. I wouldn’t have dreamed that I had at least two tenuous connections to Matt Craven.
