The benevolent witchery of one of our favourite friends and customers is to blame for the assault of seasonal dumping outside our doors. He knows what he does. He adores snow. He adores winter. He’s a monster. On Instagram, he posts photos of himself smiling into the bleak, icy sky, arms stretched to the heavens like a tuqued Rocky Balboa on the steps of December. We’ve asked him to stop, but he’s from Montreal and has that French stubbornness that only digs in deeper the more you push. As we drive to work skidding this way and that, we curse his name, with love. We curse the earth for orbiting away from the sun. We curse the Cycle of Life, its grip on us, its cold, seasonal Grip of Death.
Cooper is especially fraught with winter glee. She thinks there’s an animal living in the back of our property. There is not. The first night it snowed she bounded out our back door with renewed purpose, as if all those warm, comfortable days were just rest between the seasons. She chases the Ghost of Summer around our backyard like a lunatic, terrifying poor Snackers, who just wants to hunt for our cat’s poop. Poor Snackers creaks through the snow, her gentle paws lifting up from time to time, as she sniffs out Wednesday’s latest turd offering, hidden either by the fence or beneath the leafless brambles at the back, while Cooper orbits herself, a fluffy comet living its best life in oblivious joy. What’s left in our yard is a Pollockian work most baffling and cold.
Usually around this time of year, at least in retail, the streets shut down. People drive like maniacs, fighting harder to get wherever they’re going, making everyone’s life frightening. Work to home. Home to work. Maaaaaybe the grocery store, but retail is quiet. These seasonal shifts just shove us inward, like a population pulling their coats over their shoulders more tightly. Jason’s grandfather was a limo driver for the Hunt Club. He drove in New York, Detroit, and Toronto regularly, and stated, with authority, that no city had worse drivers than London, Ontario. We don’t know if you’ve been out there recently but it’s nuts, not unlike a small dog tearing around a local backyard. The shop goes quiet before folks remember, “Oh yeah, I have to, like, go out sometimes to stay healthy!”
Friends, we understand. We’re deep beneath our blankets, dogs and cats with us–a Peaceable Blanketfort Kingdom–fearing the cold, dark evenings. We’re deep into tea and wine. We’re reading books. We’re groggy in the mornings. We’re forgetting what the sun looks like. Jason is reading in the tub like it’s a raft on a wide, solemn sea. But when will he run out of books? When will those piles he’s kept seem old, like yesterdays dreams? You ever do that? Have an aspirational pile? Jason does. He keeps it by the bed. Picks at it. Then says, “Enough with this!” and brings them into the shop, shelving them like high school friends you’re relieved to never see again.
It’s then time for new titles, new dreams. Let’s devour THIS subject now. Tipper Gore and the anti-metal lobby. Let’s become an expert on THAT…in the tub. These are the quiet and lethargic manias that inform our winter lives. Or maybe you’re the type of demented person who gets INVIGORATED by the cold. Maybe you see the sky falling onto the ground in pieces and think, “This is MY time.” Bless you, strange creature. On your arctic walkabout please stop in the store and explain it to us. We will listen. We love the marvelous and impossible. If you’re, however, like us, then slink down the dark 2pm streets and huddle as we do in the warm bookstore, weeping, reading, and weeping, knowing only dreams will get us through.
Here are some dreams for those dark winter nights.
All the best,
Jason and Vanessa
