CBC Music Festival - Echo Beach

Janine suggested tickets to the CBC Music Festival.

It's been ages since I attended a full day music festival, and I'm always up for original, live music.

She came for the weekend and cooked Rob and me a fabulous meal of steak Friday night, so I uncorked the 1998 barolo I'd been saving. After dinner we lit a fire in the chiminea in the backyard. Perhaps we enjoyed ourselves a little bit too much, as we got a late start to the next day. But it was worth it!

We arrived around 3:00 in the afternoon and left about 10:00 pm, in the chill of the night.

The most dramatic moment of the day was when the concert venue was evacuated due to extreme weather. Laila Baili had literally just finished her set when all attendees were asked to either leave for the safety of their cars or head for shelter at the Budweiser Stage. The rain dumped down in sheets and lightning flashed the skies. A waterfall beneath our feet,  as several thousand people waited for the storm to subside.

There were three music stages, a kid's stage, and a comedy stage, so always something going on.

I finally saw Buffy Sainte-Marie! This icon is still a riveting performer - she must be in her seventies now and still strong and beautiful, singing anthems of change.

Excellent jazz musicians were the highlight for me, not just the quality of the musicianship but because they seemed to play in the smaller tent to a more intimate, appreciative crowd.

One of the top headliners, Starzs played on the main stage and everyone around us seemed to know the lyrics and sang along to the songs, although that night was my introduction to their songs.

Samantha Martin and Delta Sugar
Charlotte Cardin
Buffy Sainte-Marie
Laila Baili
Elisapie
Stars

Well, I just realized that every band I saw that day had a female lead singer, with the exception of Stars, which had both a male and female lead. Nice.

Also met the host of After Dark, Odario Williams. A very handsome face for radio :-)

Garden notes

The greening is happening! Very quickly the ravine is filling in, the spring flowers are blooming. Things were a bit late this year but the advantage is the tulips seem to be lasting much longer.

Many of the transplants to the ravine last fall seem to have survived: fern; pulminaria; solomon's seal; may apple.

Spent a few hours in the back removing and editing - wild mustard and dandy lion on the ravine slope; the witch hazel that failed to impress; weeds of unknown origin; mowing the grass. God it felt great to be getting dirt under my nails again.

Mike and Karen popped by and we were able to sit in the back and visit in our shirtsleeves. Mike had come across a book called 'The Wisdom of India' and thought I might want it on my shelf. Very thoughtful.

Full Flower Moon - May 2019

I enjoyed the Full Flower / Worm Moon in Ottawa and Chelsea Quebec. Rob and I were there feasting and catching up with old friends. The get-together has become something of an annual tradition. We stayed at Joe's and Jan's with Chris and Art on Friday night, while Tony and Mary and Shelley and Pat joined us at the table for a meal of prime rib. The next night was the same group at Mary's and Tony's for tapas. Lots of crazy-delicious food but even better were the laughter and ease in the air.En route to Chelsea we tried to take in the Tulip Festival - unbelievably busy and impossible to park. Busloads of tourists were wending their way along the canal, checking out food tents and the arts & crafts fair. Yet because of all the cold weather, the tulips are far behind in their opening. Many were closed buds. Late for their own opening!

The Flower Moon was full May 18th

Literary Feasts

The theme for this month's Epitourists started with spring and then morphed to literary greens and settled in nicely to literature.

I was trying to decide on the dish I would bring to Wolfe Island when I realized Rob and I also had a commitment to visit friends in Ottawa/Quebec. Darn! I know this will be a great feast and it would be wonderful to see the Island greening in the spring.

Still I have been participating in spirit and trying to choose my dish.

Green eggs and ham? A tea party, a la Alice? Dare to eat a peach?

One of the first literary foods that sprang to mind was from David Eggers book A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, when he wrote about slicing the circles of an orange and placing them on his younger brother's plate, to brighten up a canned food dinner and add some vitamin C. Funny how that image has stayed with me for so many years!

In my research I came across a book called Pleasures of the Table, A literary anthology compiled by Christina Hardyment, and spent a few hours at virtual feasts: Roman bacchanals, domestic dinners, picnics with Peter Rabbit. A "spare feast! a radish and an egg" savoured by the fire in The Task by poet William Cowper.

Memorable: MFK Fisher writing in Serve It Forth about the secret pleasures of crisped tangerine sections:

Almost every person has something secret he likes to eat.
...It was then that I discovered little dried sections of tangerine. My pleasure in them is subtle and voluptuous and quite inexplicable. I can only write how they are prepared.
In the morning, in the soft sultry chamber, sit in the window peeling tangerines, three or four. Peel them gently; do not bruise them, as you watch soldiers pour past and past the corner and over the canal towards the watched Rhine. Separate each plump little pregnant crescent. If you find the Kiss, the secret section, save it for Al.
Listen to the chambermaid thumping up the pillows, and murmur encouragement to her thick Alsatian tales of l'intérieure. That is Paris, the interior, Paris or anywhere west of Strasbourg or maybe the Vosges. While she mutters of seduction and French bicyclists who ride more than wheels, tear delicately from the soft pile of sections each velvet string. You know those white pulpy strings that hold tangerines into their skins? Tear them off. Be careful.
Take yesterday's paper (when we were in Strasbourg L'Ami du Peuple was best, because when it got hot the ink stayed on it) and spread it on top of the radiator. The maid has gone, of course - it might be hard to ignore her belligerent Alsatian glare of astonishment.
After you have put the pieces of tangerine on the paper on the hot radiator, it is best to forget about them. Al comes home, you go to a long noon dinner in the brown dining-room, afterwards maybe you have a little nip of quetsch from the bottle on the armoire. Finally he goes. You are sorry, but -
On the radiator the sections of tangerines have grown even plumper, hot and full. You carry them to the window, pull it open, and leave them for a few minutes on the packed snow of the sill. They are ready.
All afternoon you can sit, then, looking down on the corner. Afternoon papers are delivered to the kiosk. Children come home from school just as three lovely whores mince smartly into the pension's chic tearoom. A basketful of Dutch tulips stations itself by the tram-stop, ready to tempt tired clerks at six o'clock. Finally the soldiers stump back from the Rhine. It is dark.
The sections of the tangerine are gone, and I cannot tell you why they are so magical. Perhaps it is that little shell, thin as one layer of enamel on a Chinese bowl, that crackles so tinily, so ultimately under your teeth. Or the rush of cold pulp just after it. Or the perfume. I cannot tell.
There must be someone, though, who understands what I mean. Probably everyone does, because of his own secret eatings.

And this recipe from the 1770s, To Raise a Salad in Two Hours, from The Art of Cookery made plain and easy:

Take fresh horse dung hot, lay it in a tub near the fire, then sprinkle some mustard seeds thick on it, lay a thin layer of horse dung over it, cover it close and keep it by the fire, and it will rise high enough to cut in two hours.

Native plant sale

My garden has an abundance of native plants. I've been a convert for many years, since learning of their benefits for local birds and bugs. With the added advantage they are adapted to thrive without fertilizers and constant care.

I was debating whether to plant the seedlings from the native plant sale... there was snow last week, although it melted as it hit the ground. These are natives, though, and used to our fickle spring.

Hoping these like their new homes & I will be taking photos of them thriving during the summer.

Butterfly milkweed - front garden
lancet-leaved coreopsis - front garden
pale purple cornflower - front garden
Foxglove beardtongue - 1 back garden, 1 front garden
large toothwort (ephemeral) - back garden near the bloodroot
Flowering dogwood - ravine
wild bergamot - back garden
maidenhair fern - ravine

There were some jack-in-the-pulpits for sale but absolutely nothing showing in the pots... I need more signs of life before handing over cash.