Book & Bramble - March 2024
A Letter from Caitlyn Paxson
Dear Reader,
In a lot of ways, this March felt like a month of waiting. Waiting for various professional shenanigans to be confirmed, waiting for winter to finish its messy parting tantrums and spring to come, waiting for logistics to fall into place for upcoming travel… and now it’s April, and I don’t actually feel like any of those things have been resolved! I suppose, then, that my lesson for this season is one of patience.
Image Description: Walking in the Malpeque cemetery. The dead are always patient, I suppose.
I feel like patience is a lesson I am constantly relearning, though I will say that as I get older it does get easier, if only by virtue of the fact that time passes so much faster! And around these parts, there’s always a cat to snuggle while you wait.
Image Description: Monty and the Contessa monopolizing my chair. Bruce lounging on a beautiful quilt made by my mother-in-law, Heather.
Remembering
I mentioned in my January newsletter that my beloved Aunt Barbara passed away. In the weeks since then, I have been arranging a memorial for her, and that has meant going through a lot of memories and photographs. She was a prolific artist, who worked in many different mediums and gave me many beautiful things over the years. The things she made for me were not always the same sorts of things she made to sell – she paid attention to what I liked and tried to cater to my interests. I thought I’d share a few things she made with me in mind, all of which combine her skills for fabric collage and embroidery.
Image Description: An embroidered dragon bag, from my adolescent dragon obsession. My very own unicorn tapestry that she made me after I fell in love with the originals at the Musée de Cluny in Paris.
Image Description: A portrait of me as a fairy.
Crafting
March is always a bit of a struggle for my Wreath of the Month project. Everything is brown and mushy, I’ve exhausted the winter foraging options around the farm, and it’s still cold enough that traipsing around in costumes out of doors isn’t entirely appealing. To be completely honest, this crown is a bit of a slap-dash, recycled affair: I reused a past crown as the base and stuck a bunch of driftwood sticks to it. I wasn’t at all certain how I was going to make it look like more than the sum of its parts. But then one evening, a warm mist rolled in across the fields, and I felt compelled to sneak off to the beach before dark fell.
Image Description: Driftwood Queen
This beach is a provincial park, and I found it abandoned, the tide out and the sands thoroughly soaked with rain and sea. It was a Tempest sort of night, and I was inspired by Ariel’s song: Those are the pearls that were his eyes: nothing of him that doth fade, but doth suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange.
Reading:
I’ve once again been doing a lot of reading for NPR reviews that I can’t share just yet, but I’ve also found some time for a few romance novels here and there. The Gentleman’s Gambit is the last in Evie Dunmore’s historical romance series and features a suffragist and scholar who gets entangled with a gentleman intent on repatriating artifacts stolen by the British to his home in Mount Lebanon. Romance AND artifact ethics? Yes, please! Trouble by Lex Croucher is another historical romance, this time focusing on a sort of Jane Eyre situation where a governess goes to work in a house on false pretenses, only to discover that the family she was determined to hate is actually quite lovely. I love a prickly heroine and a found family who are determined to love her anyway, so this was a real winner for me. I also appreciate the amount of focus on the other staff who work in the house and how all of their lives are entwined. And last but not least, At First Spite is Olivia Dade’s latest, so I had to pick it up. I’ve raved about Dade here before – her books were my first foray into contemporary romance and I love the plus size heroine representation she always delivers. The premise of this one is a bit odd: a woman has no choice but to live in the tiny spite house between her ex-fiance’s house and his brother’s house – the same brother who convinced him to break off their engagement. While at times I found it all a bit far-fetched, I loved the messy feelings that Dade always gets just right.
Image Description: Romance Roundup!
Musing
March is done, and that means that seed-starting time is upon us! I am so excited to set up my shelf and grow lights and plant all the little seeds I have squirrelled away for this summer’s garden. I’m trying some new things this year, and I can hardly wait. In the meantime, here’s a little taste of what we have in store…
Image Description: Bounty from last summer's garden.
Until next time, wishing you the best books and the most berry-full brambles,
Caitlyn
I write this from the traditional unceded territory known as Mi’kma’ki. Two books by Indigenous authors that I really enjoyed recently are To Shape a Dragon’s Breath by Moniquill Blackgoose and Into the Bright Open by Cherie Dimaline.