something different.

When we first moved to Montreal three years ago, we promised ourselves just a couple of things. 

One, we would have fun. We would have an adventure. Two, that we would learn a little French, and learn a lot about this part of Canada you couldn't really understand when you don't live here. And three, that we wouldn't stay forever.

It's three years later, now, and while we didn't always imagine that we would be ready to move on and have new adventures somewhere else quite this soon, we recently came to the realization that we really wanted more. And that we would never get it here. 

We're going to be leaving Montreal with fond memories, amazing new friends, good stories, a LONG list of great restaurants you should eat at when you visit, an excellent sense of how to get from A to B without having to drive on the Decarie, no more fear of "Crazy Montreal Drivers" (because we, too, are those people, now), an appreciation for clean air, why you really shouldn't turn right on red, Quebec Culture and some excellent French practice.

When we started talking about where to go next, there were many MANY places on the list. Tokyo!, I suggested (because, well, why not?). New Zealand, suggested Brett (he's been watching a lot of Lord of the Rings lately). Vancouver? No (Sorry YVR pals). Toronto? Definitely no (too...Toronto). We went through a long list (San Francisco, New York, Seattle, and on, and on), but eventually, we settled on the one place we both immediately thought YES about, and that place, was Ottawa. We're coming home.

Now begins the hard (and fun) part: finding a new job, buying a new home, saying goodbye to Montreal, and having another new adventure in a city that is familiar yet so different from the one we left behind.

We can't wait. See you this summer, friends.

sea breeze

we went to carmel. it was more than we imagined, and all that we wanted.

clara.

My grandmother was many things, but I'll tell you about what I remember the most.

Like many women of her generation, she had an astute sense of what was proper and ladylike. She dressed with finesse, and took great care with her wardrobe. I remember once, as a child, opening up her closets to discover rows of well-organized dresses, modest skirts, and beautiful pant-suits, many in garment bags, and hung together as full outfits rather than individual pieces above racks and racks of matching shoes. She took great pride in her collection, and every piece had a story to go along with it. Where she had worn it, where it had come from, and what pieces from her vast collection of accessories were best suited. It was rare to come across her in a dressing gown, and under no circumstances would she don a pair of jeans or casual pants, opting instead for low heels, tasteful blouses and vibrant scarves. In my late teens she once said to me "real ladies don't wear jeans." The idea of denim was so distasteful to her, as if she were personally insulted by a pair of levi's. It's largely because of her that I own just two pairs of pants and opt for dresses and skirts nearly every day, whether it's -40 or +20 outside. I hear her voice in the back of my head every time I walk past Jeans, Jeans, Jeans. She would have been appalled.

Her life was a constant stream of adventures. My grandfather, John, was a documentarian of sorts, and kept unbelievably detailed logs of all they did together. Every car trip, down to the passengers (Clara, my father Peter, his sister, Penny, and occasionally, their cat) and where they stopped for lunch, fuel, or for the night. When we could sit with my grandmother before she was lost to us, she would tell us stories about their travels. The time they went to Iceland, those trips to Myrtle Beach and the lazy river she liked to float in that was part of the hotel pool, and all of the miles they covered in their RV, from the coasts of Canada to the southern tips of the United States. I sat with her once, in a seniors home in Mississauga, long after dementia had started to take away her sense of here and now, as she told me about her art school adventures - she was one of the first women to attend NSCAD, and a talented painter. She traveled the eastern parts of the country after the death of her first husband, taking over his business in order to put food on the table for her two children, in a time where it was not all that common. She was tough, she was strong, and she was full of spirit.  

She suffered from dementia for the last years of her life, and it's especially sad to me that what really took her from us, in the end, took the stories of her adventures away, too.

An avid collector of things, she kept careful, handwritten notes with them all. The notes detailed a variety of things - family history, funny stories of where each piece came from, and who she wanted to see inherit them when they could no longer be her own. A few years ago, my mother, sister, my aunt and myself, spent time sorting through them all. Some pieces went back only twenty years, others more than one hundred. Each of them was stored, carefully, in tiny jewellery bags, with even tinier scraps of paper covered in her hard-to-read writing. "For Robyn Paton. Approx. 1870," one read. "My mother's mother's brooch. Very old." It's the one I'll wear to her funeral this Thursday. It's her birthday, and somehow fitting that that we celebrate the wonderful life that she lived on the day that she first came into it.

Clara E. Watt (Paton; Macphail)  -- March 7, 1922 - March 1, 2013. 

the things we remember.

Things I remember about places I have mostly forgotten with time.

- - -

7 am. Amsterdam. I tiptoe down the rackety stairs in my apartment building and out the door, stopping only to toss my earbuds in my ears. A quick right turn leads me directly into the red light district, where women are still dancing, and foreign tourists are still spreading eyes wide trying to figure out how to make something like this possible in their home countries. Good luck, fellows. I shoulder through the crowd, across the bridge and into Dam square, where the group is waiting for me, all smiles and morning coffee. A hundred bicycles go by, a tram, a tiny european car. We sit and watch the traffic, sipping espressos and wishing we could stay forever. I still occasionally wish it were home.

- - -

The sun rises over the dusty dirt lot in the Uighur hotel, and we step out onto the street. In half an hour we are set to leave for more desert, days upon days of dusty beige desert at this point, more temples and statues and famous art carvings. Our just-showered bodies and newly cleaned clothes are instantly covered in dust. A bicycle with fifty chickens on the back totters by, and a local sweeps the sand from the sidewalk to the street and back again. Grapes grow overhead in the streets, and we pass by the spot where just last night, two young chinese boys told us how they want to go to america because it's better. They are fascinated by our lives, our oozing north-american-ness, our mastery of english and how we respond to their sometimes manic hellos and goodbyes. But all they really want is a dream of somewhere other than the place they're in. And you can't blame them for something that we all want, can you?

dutch babies

After a mildly insane week, this was the chillout weekend to end all chillout weekends (except for the thirty minutes I spent standing in Williams Sonoma in Laval this afternoon. Let's never ever do that again). We made these amazing pancakes (try these if you haven't already), cancelled our cable (yes!), people-watched over coffee at Sardine, and I worked madly to try to finish up this one insane project before a new batch of fabric arrives and the madness starts all over again. I spent a lot of time catching up on my backlog of Pocket and Instapaper stories, including this fabulous gem about the IT meltdown the Romney campaign created for themselves last week with Project Orca, which made me think that whomever was managing that project had never worked in technology before. No beta, no instructions, no testing, no success. Awesome.

Some other great reads:

• The Last King Of Print - I use my iPad for reading more than anything else, but seriously, nothing beats a good magazine you can flip through the pages of. Next time I'm in New York, Casa Magazines is going to get a visit.
• Not writing is your alligator - "If you write something because you want to impress people that piece of writing will probably not be very good (but it might!)".
• The Possibilian - timing and the brain, a fascinating mystery.