Let’s talk about last weekend. After having been T-boned on the 410 during an ice storm twenty years ago (when I was spun across five lanes of traffic and when someone I knew was killed a kilometre away under a jack-knifed tractor-trailer the same afternoon), I am absolutely phobic about icy roads. Like my dad, I watch the weather intently, the difference being that he did it out of interest while I do so out of terror. Last week I was our art group’s unofficial Cassandra, direly prophesying the storm I couldn’t help monitoring like a bunny watching a cougar.
Lest you think I over-reacted, consider the evidence. My presence somewhere (anywhere) attracts weather catastrophes — the once-in-a-century Christmas snowstorm on the temperate West Coast, an earthquake, for heaven’s sake, on another visit, a five day power outage on the East Coast, a provincial grid collapse the day I had had an extraction and couldn’t chew whole food….. I could go on, but you get the idea. Remember that little Indian on L’il Abner who travelled with a storm cloud over this head? Me.
Add to this history the fact that our spring art show and sale inevitably attracts rotten weather. I honestly can’t remember a year when it did not blow hard, rain hard, or snow hard; this year it looked as though we were going to get a three-for-one deal.
So my spidey-sense vibrated like a pneumatic drill all last week.
Stormzilla did not disappoint. Seasoned troopers, we lasted until Sunday morning, when it became life-threatening to leave home. A bunch of us converged on VAM and took the show down. Then we crept home and huddled near our fireplaces, listening to the wind. In fact, our neighbours lost two enormous trees but for some reason none of ours fell down this time. The weather gods must have gotten our address wrong.
But I did have an idea born of desperation. How about a pop-up show and no mention of my name in the advertising? Just a mysterious phone call giving you a location and time.
Maybe next year we'll see you on a parking lot nearby. Shhhhh.
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