Hello friends, 

I’ve got some new music brewing. . . A collection of songs about various kinds of quiet. “Songs For a Quiet Day” is due out May 30th. 

The songs on this album honour various kinds of quiet…the quiet of waking at dawn, the quiet of children no longer being small, the quiet of a winter day spent inside with the dog, the quiet after war, the quiet of the first swim of early summer, the quiet of birds in trees, of gardens in bloom, of an evening spent watching the stars come out. 

Most of the songs were recorded on an old Canadian upright piano. And string composer, Adrian Dolan, has composed the most beeeeeauuuuuutiful string parts for seven of the songs.

Two tracks have already been released on listening platforms. You can listen and purchase here on Bandcamp, but I really need your streams, so don’t feel bad if you listen on Spotify or Apple Music. It’s good for the algorithms. 🙂

Much love!

Dear ones,
I’ve been posting tiny stories
& poems & sometimes art
over on Instagram these days.
Feel free to follow me over there
or just pop in to see what I’m up to.

xo

VISIT ME ON INSTAGRAM

When I wrote this song last November I had no idea how much more the lyrics would apply in November 2020. It’s been quite a year. 

This song is about anxiety and the grounding of the natural world. Of turning away from the frightening news headlines and looking, instead, at what is directly in front of us.

Big thank yous to Adrian Dolan who composed and played the beautiful string parts and Winston Hauschild for the fine production. 

Graham Herbert is riding his bicycle across Canada. 

Except he just wants to do it from here, he tells me. So he rides all over our small, beautiful island, clocking the miles. He is not going to stop until he reaches Nova Scotia.

I see him nearly every time I go out, flying along the shoulder of the road on his old ten-speed with curled handlebars. Today I saw him on my way to take my daughter to the ferry. He was wearing all tie-dye—and I do mean ALL tie-dye. His white ZZ Top beard goes down past his collarbones, and when he’s biking fast, the end of it flies out beside him like a scarf. He must be in his 70s now. I love him. He is a painter, and everything he paints is done in vibrant, multicoloured acrylics. Today he looked like one of his own paintings.

There are so many people here on this island who live their lives as if they are a character in their own movie. It seems to me this is the only way I could stand to get old, if I reinvented myself and became eccentric in some way: a palm reader with wild silver hair; a gardener who clips back her roses while dressed in exquisite ball gowns and singing opera to the birds; a seaside cafe owner with long, white braids who, on slow afternoons, plays banjo to the seagulls.

On my way home, I passed Graham again, headed the other way. The road had begun to dip down and he was going so fast he was nothing but a single blurred streak of colour and light. 

 

 

It has been raining off and on for days. In the house, the grey light shifts, the fire clicks. The dog sighs and goes back to sleep.

It is hard to believe it is only mid-September with all this cold and rain. The summer walked off and dropped down a steep incline. I did not swim enough, eat enough cherries, pick enough flowers, watch enough sunsets, take enough bike rides down the dusty paths, is what I think, watching the rain. Only I did all of those things, and often. I swam most afternoons. I kept fresh cherries stocked in a paper bag on the top shelf of the fridge. I had handfuls of Sweet Peas, fragrant and bright, in a mason jar on the windowsill every day from late June to early September. I saw the sun fall into the sea so often, I grew accustomed to it and forgot, sometimes, to honor that gorgeous split second when it edges the horizon before dropping. I rode my bike to work at the bakery four days a week, along cool paths between old cedars, then home again.

But I want more.

It makes me think of that famous Nora Ephron essay where she dumps an entire bottle of lemon-scented bath oil into the bathwater because she loves being alive so much and one—as instructed— capful doesn’t feel like nearly enough.

All summer I’ve been meditating on the dead cedar at the side of the yard. I never meant to; I meditate with my eyes open, and out on the porch bench, it was simply the spot my eyes fell when I relaxed them into my morning stillness practice. 

When I realized the cedar was dead, I allowed it to inform my stillness, taking it in as an exercise in acceptance. The tree started to speak to me in that quiet way that trees talk.

Sometimes things just die, the tree said. There is nothing to be done. It is the way of things.

It unclenched my heart, heavy sometimes with my own little deaths—the failure of my marriage, my complicated relationship with my first daughter. 

It’s all mixed together, the tree said. You can’t have it another way. To reject the death part is to reject the life part too. 

When I went inside, I picked up a book about a garden a friend recommended, and in its pages, I found this:

Gardens, however disasterous, are beneficent. The return of the
seasons allows us to try again. Again and again—there is no end.
What failed last summer can be attempted in the next. Even as
the flower dies, it is preparing for revival in the spring.

Thyme is coming up in the garden. I sprinkle it on my scrambled eggs the way a woman showed me once in a quiet house on a small island. She was old and grew enormous dahlias in her garden. Morning light slanted across her from a small window as she stirred butter in the pan. The eggs were good and as I watched her move about her kitchen I found I was no longer afraid of aging.

 

Every summer of my childhood, as far back as I can remember, the ice cream truck wound its way through the streets of our subdivision, and up to our road, Griffin Terrace. It started coming in mid-May, when the daytime weather began to be consistently warm, after the lilacs but before my mother’s gladiolas, usually when my father was out mowing the lawn or tinkering with his truck in the driveway and I was playing hopscotch or Chinese skipping on the sidewalk with a few of the neighborhood kids. It came every few days, all summer long, and kept coming until mid-September when the nights cooled, and kids stayed indoors more, and the leaves on our Mountain Ash began to turn orange and fall.

The ice cream truck cranked out a medley of tinny, music-box-style instrumentals—most of which were happy and jovial, as ice cream truck songs should be. Peter Piper. Somewhere over the Rainbow. Happy Days are Here Again.

But there was this one sweet-sad tune in the mix that I didn’t recognize. It was slower than the others, and started out low and pretty, then climbed in a lilting pattern toward what felt like a grief-stricken high note, before falling again, leaving the listener hanging, unresolvedly, somewhere in the middle.

The song had an irredeemable quality to it. Life was sad, it seemed to say, and always would be. My heart ached every time it played, and I couldn’t help imagine summer passing, then my childhood. I pictured my parents getting old and my brother moving away and then I pictured the passing of everything.

I was always relieved when Peter Piper kicked back in, lifting me out of the pit of existential dread I’d briefly stumbled into.

Sometimes, long after the ice cream truck had left our street for another neighborhood, I heard my mother humming the melody. A few times, I caught her singing it, with words, in the kitchen as she stood at the counter peeling potatoes for dinner.

Where are the clouds? Send in the clouds, she sang.

The lyrics, when I heard them, made the song seem even sadder. Why would anyone want the clouds to come? I thought about it on the front steps while I sat nibbling my homemade orange juice popsicle. Maybe, I deduced, the song was written in the south, where the summers are long and hot and the songwriter was hoping for rain. I tried to picture a man out in his garden, standing watch over his carrots and lettuce in the dry soil, lifting his face to the hot summer sky, a kind of prayer: Where are the clouds? Send in the clouds.

This explanation gave the song a happier twist, but the story didn’t match up with the melody. So still, every time the ice cream truck found its way up to Griffin Terrace, the song left me with a small ache.

Years later, over the phone, I asked my mother about the song. I hadn’t heard it since the ice cream truck days, and I wanted to know how the rest of it went.

“Which song?” she said, confused.

“You know. The one about clouds that the ice cream truck used to play.” I hummed the bit of tune I could still remember.

She laughed. “Not clouds. Clowns.”

She sang it properly for me: Isn’t it bliss? Don’t’ you approve? One who keeps tearing around, one who can’t move. Where are the clowns? Send in the clowns.

 “That melody line always used to make me feel so melancholy,” I said.

“It is a rather depressing tune for an ice cream truck to play,” she said.

After I hung up, I googled “Send in the Clowns”. I found a live performance by Judi Dench with a string orchestra. The ice cream truck’s music box version, I realized, had been stiff and a bit off-rhythm. This version swelled and fell, soared and plummeted. It sounded to me like the soundtrack to the final scene in some tragic tale.

I shut it off.

 

 

 

There is a raven shrieking from a nearby tree. It sounds like a furious, old woman who smokes too much. The raven woke me this morning at first light, as it has nearly every morning for the past few weeks.

In the spring, it was the rooster. The neighbor was having trouble getting it back into its pen and so, for several weeks, it wandered freely, appearing just below our bedroom windows at dawn to crow at the morning.

I had always heard the rooster from the neighbors’ house; it was a sound I tolerated, if not enjoyed—I’ll take farm sounds over sirens any day. But hearing it so close, through an open window, is startling first-thing. My daughters kept getting out of bed at 6:45 am on the weekends, and I would look at them with swollen eyes and insist it was far too early to start the day. I made actual, pre-meditated plans as to how to trap the rooster. It involved a blanket and a Rubbermaid container. I’d heard about an older woman, a long-time homesteader on our island, who kills chickens with her bare hands using a broomstick and a piece of rope. I considered asking her for more information. When I failed to catch the rooster—he was too fast and the blanket too inaccurate—I entertained elaborate fantasies of crushing it—quickly, painlessly—by dropping the bedside table from the upstairs window.

Now the raven.

I imagine it is defending a nest, but must it do so so aggressively? All the other birds in the neighborhood have their act together—successfully guarding their young in a quiet, peaceful manner. Why must this raven create such clamour?

But morning. O, morning I might otherwise miss. The Foxglove is blooming at the edges of the yard, and the Rock Roses on my porch are opening across the wooden porch rail. My white Rosa rugosa, the one I moved into a bigger pot last weekend, is opening and it smells like something from another world. The sky is marbled with blue; at the western edge, rain is moving on long, skinny legs across the horizon. And if I listen past the noise of the shrieking raven, there are other bird sounds, tiny, sweet notes of several different tones and cadences and variations, all layered against each other.

Sometimes my mind is like the raven. Shrieking, incessant, inconsolable. But if I get quiet enough, I find something underneath, something worth tuning into.

What I’m trying to say is: mornings are good to get quiet in. And deep down, I feel somewhat indebted to these birds that keep waking me.