Cafe Maplethorpe Blog :: PEI Restaurant

Hard to believe we made it to December 6, 2009 before the first snow of the new season. Even so, it caught us all off guard! Winter is officially here!

Maplethorpe on Dec. 6, 2009

Ice in the Trees

My Montana friend Father Gary always says that February is the worst month for unhappiness. No money but plenty of bills. A blinding flash of the obvious that the New Year’s Resolution to (lose weight, stop smoking, change your life, whatever), is a joke. Lousy weather. Fr. Gary always finds that complaints, dissatisfaction and general malaise are at their peak in February. And being a priest, he would hear it all.

In Prince Edward Island, the month of malaise is March. Today is March 3 and this is the TENTH day of school cancellation this winter for inclement weather. TEN DAYS of kids in the house when they shouldn’t be. The entire world is a sheet of ice with scattered power outages all across the Island from ice bending branches on to transmission lines. No one wants to come out to lunch in this weather, so the café is empty. (Miraculously the mail gets delivered…bills can find you through anything.) I resist the urge to call or e-mail Fr. Gary to lodge my litany of complaints—it is the wrong month for him to listen.

Ice Melt…A Reason to Go to Town

Instead, I go off to the big box store in Summerside to pick up another bag of ice melt. I head straight to the ‘seasonal’ section. Something is wrong–the smell hit me before I got past the pharmacy. Liquid lawn herbicide…you know that peculiar acrid stench. Where last week there were snow shovels and ice melt I found a sea of bar-b-que grills and islands of potting soil.

My God, people.

I stomped up to the front and asked where I could find Saf-T-Salt.

Nope, I was told. All gone. Little scraps of Pepto-Bismol colored ‘Spring Fashions’ hang nearby.

Better Than Ice Melt

I ended up buying a bag of organic granulated fertilizer and a sack of cat litter. The fertilizer will melt the ice and the cat litter will provide traction. Effective, but messy. We’ll make it through this weather and next winter I will try to remember to stock up on ice melt early in the season.

We are still 2 months from spring in Prince Edward Island. I am just hoping for no more school cancellation days.

Wayne Wright's Editorial Cartoon, Journal Pioneer, Summerside, March 4, 2009

School is closed today, courtesy of a big dump of snow last night. It was closed last Thursday as well, that day because of an ice storm. Winter on Prince Edward Island.

Shoveling Snow….Again

I don’t mind school closure, especially on days when it seems obvious. We had enough snow last night that there is a 6 ft wall around our property created by the snowplows. But having a teen around the house all day is inconvenient. When I need to check e-mail on the laptop I have to evict her from her Facebook pals. Then I have to repeat—once again—that no, I am not going to buy her a laptop for her exclusive use. And while we are talking, how can you watch television, chat via the computer and text on the cel phone all at once? She’ll wander into the kitchen several times today begging for food. For some reason, a 16 year old is utterly incapable of putting together even a sandwich if the Mom is around the house.

Dianna shoveling snow

I like a little bit of new snow, partly because of my dog. He has a routine that involves access to food—first thing in the morning he goes outside to “take care of his business.” When that is done, he can go in and eat. And he really likes to eat. At about 5 a.m. if he hasn’t been crated the evening before, he will jump on the bed, lick our faces, gently bite our hands—anything to get us to take him out.

Tonks was groomed a few weeks ago, slick shaved. When his fur is longer he likes a long romp through the pines behind the house but hairless he sticks close to the house. He has a specific spot that he likes to head for to make his deposit every cold morning. And after a few weeks we give a new meaning to the ‘House on Pooh Corner,’ if you get the picture. A little new snow covers up the sad fact that I need to spend more time outside with the pooper scooper.

Jim clearing show with the loader

We cooked and served at Maplethorpe right up to December 23, then dropped everything and rushed to the Halifax airport to open our Christmas gift—a week ‘s vacation in sunny Southern California. 2008 was a busy year for both the bed and breakfast and the café, and we had earned a change.

And what a change! Every suburban community has 200,000 people or more—almost half again more than then entire year-round population of PEI. Hundreds of identical Southern California communities along the beach, millions of people connected by a crazy patchwork of freeways. It sure isn’t University Avenue in Charlottetown, people.

Southern California Beaches

California Style

To blend in with the locals we were required to wear tiny shorts paired with furry knee boots and start every morning at a Starbucks. We elbowed our way through all the crowded tourist sites and gorged ourselves on Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese and Mexican food, washed down with good California wine. It was all great, except one thing. We wanted to visit a bookstore called the “Cooks Library,” billed as “the place” where the hottest LA chefs go to research new recipes and purchase exotic cookbooks. I deliberately packed light on the trip out just in case I needed to drag home half a suitcase of new cookbooks from this place. We spent a morning finding it, then took another half hour finding a parking space within a mile of the shop, only to read the handwritten sign on the door that said the store was closed for a week.

The thought crossed my mind that maybe in some ironic twist they had read about Café Maplethorpe and were on Prince Edward Island right now standing on our porch reading the handwritten note on our front door…

Vacation was just about over. We watched the New Year’s Eve ball drop in New York’s Times Square on the television at 8:00 pm local time and went to bed in anticipation of our early flight back to Halifax the next morning. The week had gone by fast.

Back to Reality

The LA to New York portion of the return flight went well. Flying reminds us how anchovies feel, all packed on top of each other in those tiny cans. We got a bad sensation when we got off the plane in New York and surveyed the departure gate monitor for our Halifax flight. It wasn’t listed. As we soon found out, the Halifax airport was closed due to high winds and snow—blizzard conditions.

I asked the nearest gate agent what we were to do and she directed us to go to the gate printed on our boarding passes even if it wasn’t listed on the departure screen. Skipping past the long and ugly confrontation between the pathetic, stranded passengers and the cold-hearted airline representatives, we found ourselves several hours later on a flight to Bangor, Maine—the closest place we could get to Prince Edward Island without sleeping in a New York airport terminal for the next 3 days.

Welcome Home to PEI

I am by nature a stoic person, but my feet started to get cold in New York when we walked out on the tarmac to board the commuter airplane. They stayed cold during the flight and got even colder in Bangor where the windchill was minus about a hundred degrees. (“That’s Fahrenheit, dear, not that wimpy Celsius you people have in Canada.”) I think my husband slept on the motel room floor that night to guarantee that I didn’t touch him with my feet. Despite extra socks and a hot meal, my feet stayed frozen all the way to Prince Edward Island aboard the Acadian Bus Lines coach that brought us home the next day. Exactly one week later to the day, my feet are still cold.

When my feet are cold, I am miserable, and I can’t think of anything except warming them up. Hot baths, hot soup, hot tea, wool socks—I’ve tried them all. In case you’re wondering, it really isn’t that cold on Prince Edward Island, either. Although there is snow on the ground, the temperatures are just a few degrees below freezing. Before Christmas I could practically go outside barefoot in this weather.

Lessons Learned

I blame it on that week in California. When you live in a cold place, it is just too much of a shock to your body to go to a really warm spot for a week then immediately return to the cold. As wonderful as it seems at the time, it is just too confusing for all of the blood vessels, capillaries and internal organs. Maybe I will write a letter to the Island’s Chief Medical Officer and suggest a Provincial ban on all of those Spring Break trips from Charlottetown to Cuba, the Dominican and Florida. It could save a lot of Islanders the misery and expense that I’ve recently endured.

I know that next time we plan a winter trip south to warm up, we’ll be thinking of sunny southern North Dakota or perhaps Upstate New York. We’ll probably drive.