The babe with the power
Truman Capote's signature and a lobster rope labyrinth
In the middle of my last update, I said:
“I’d love for our space to host lively knit nights and letter writing evenings, but I struggle to know what days and times to schedule them for. I’m worried I will choose wrong, and then no one will show up as a result.”
I bravely shared those sentiments to our business’s FB page, worried the response would be crickets and tumbleweed. But folks in the comments were really excited about the chance to get together and knit and crochet. We quickly sorted out that Sunday afternoons would be the best times, and no one seemed to mind if I opened it up to whatever sorts of projects someone wanted to work on, and so our weekly Crafternoon was born!
We hosted our first one on November 10th, and it was even more cozy and joyous than I hoped. We’ve held them every Sunday since, and it has 100% become the highlight of my week. I’m meeting new people, acquaintances are becoming friends, and people who were already friends are taking me aside and being like “Do you see this? You are doing it!!” At least one person has showed up every time. Some weeks I think we’ve had maybe ten? Both the busy weeks and the more quiet weeks have their charm, I’m really glad we have that mix.
In our reading about eliminating loneliness1, we learned that the most isolated age demographics are under 20 or over 80. With that in mind, we designed a couple of completely delightful musical afternoons.
The first was a lively singalong with our friend Zakary Miller, to which we invited residents from Queens Manor, a nearby long-term care facility. We promised “country classics and future favourites” and Zakary really delivered. Some of the songs were 100 years old, as were some of the attendees!
As you can hear in this video, the audience had a great time. Zakary said that there was a woman sitting in front of him who sang harmonies on nearly every song. Isn’t that just the most wonderful thing you’ve ever heard?
I kept saying “This is the best day of my life” over and over, wiping away tears. I genuinely love that era of music, and seeing all the smiling faces made every past struggle feel worthwhile. And this post Queens Manor made after the event me feel like my heart was going to burst.
The second was a story and songs event designed for the younger end of the age spectrum. Heather Stevens — aka “Miss Heather” — is the retired Children’s Programmer of South Shore Public Libraries. She generously offered to come out of retirement and do an hour of holiday songs and stories for little ones (and their families!).
The news that Heather would be coming out of retirement to perform at our store was met with elation all over Queens County. On the day of the event, it was easy to see what all the fuss was about.
Miss Heather is truly an amazing storyteller, and her voice (which she kept apologizing for because she was recovering from a cold!) was beautiful.
I loved seeing so many giggling children in the shop, and was overjoyed to hear Heather start a sentence with “Next time we do one of these …” I didn’t want to get my hopes up that we’d do this more than once, but I really hope we are able to make it a regular happening.
We also really want to create a lot of all-ages evening events in the space, because it’s hard to find “after dark” (which is about 5pm this time of year) things to do that aren’t centred around alcohol. To that end, we planned (and then postponed by one day due to a storm) the most lovely Solstice celebration imaginable.
One of the highlights was the soft launch of Salt-water Ballad Books, a new venture by Jeremiah Boyter, the former owner of the Hamilton-based Chaises Musicales — who has since moved to Port Medway. He’s converting a barn into a retail space on his property, but in the meantime we will be hosting a popup of his books and records and movies in our store.
As an unexpected side effect of inviting a new friend to sell old books in our even older building, Truman Capote’s signature is currently living at Rosefinch Mercantile:
But the real showstopper of the night was the unimaginably enchanting labyrinth installation that local labyrinth enthusiast Mary P. MacIntosh made with rope that lobster fishers use and lit with beautiful ice lanterns. I’d been dreaming of collaborating with Mary since we first met, and the outcome was beyond my wildest dreams. In this video, you can hear Mary explaining to participants the difference between a maze and a labyrinth2.
This temporary installation made me determined to install a permanent labyrinth in the backyard by this summer.
That is just one of the many big big dreams I have for back there! The Community Garden is already so gorgeous, but there is about another 3/4 of an acre maybe that is really underdeveloped. I’m determined that by this spring we will have the money and capacity to make some real progress there.
I’m going to end this update here, because I sometimes paint myself into a corner with wanting these posts to either be utterly exhaustive or have some sort of over-arching message. It’s actually impossible for me to get caught up on everything I’ve missed between updates, and trying to do so just makes me stall on writing them even more. And maybe not everything needs some grand theme tying it all together?
(That said, if you are hoping for more introspection and a larger thesis statement, tune in next time to learn why all of our community programming stems directly from my reading this post by Josh Lora. Until then, Happy New Year!)
The vision statement for our store is “To eliminate loneliness in Port Medway"."
I guess it’s a bummer that the move Labyrinth is actually about a maze?
Audra, you continue to awe me and inspire me. It's everything you wanted in your wee space. I am so proud of you and Haritha.