i know. Everyone wants a letter in their mailbox. Pour toi. by Diana Prelevic on February 21st, 2009

Everyone eastwards is gonna hate me. So either don’t read this or hold your breath. That’s it. Breathe in deeeep. Keep it, keep it, wait for it, and don’t judge… i miss winter.

Maybe it’s an Eastern European thing, maybe it’s the whole brought-up-by-a-psychiatrist thing, heck maybe i’ve just endured enough Montreal winters (20 to be exact until i decided i just couldn’t do it anymore and haven’t since…) to feel that i don’t deserve spring right now. It’s February! It’s February and i’m in a secluded mountain town in BC where everyone complains “it’s so cold!” and i’m not looking at any thermostats but i go for long walks in a goddam thin polar fleece and this isn’t natural!

Even my dad told me “I hate you” when i said this to him yesterday. So i get it. You’re all out there enduring that impossible thing that is February and wishing i would just shut up and stop gloating. But bear with me. All i’m saying is, there’s a certain something to wintertime.

i just want it to be a little bit colder. i wanna bundle up. i love my layers. i want scarves and hats and mitts. i want snoooow. i want heaps of it! Montreal mounds. i want to don big boots and tramp around in it on street corners everywhere. i want to play in the snow! i want someone to play in the snow with me. i want snowballs thrown across snowy streets on the way to nowhere in particular and snow fights and facefulls of the icy stuff. i want to holler going down a hill on a sled that may or may not be a stolen fast food tray cause city kids are just that ghetto. Ok now i’m nostalgicizing. But i want it all, no less.

People out here just don’t know. There’s snow, ok, but it isn’t even deep enough to go past the cuff of my sorels. Maybe i just miss Montreal. Fine, i’ll admit it, fair enough: i do. i am surrounded by beautiful warm welcoming actual mountains, and i miss Mont Royal. i’m ridiculous, i know.

The precarious cusp between endings and beginnings are always a tricky ledge to be standing upon i reckon. But such is the life i lead the fluid time and place movement i welcome over and over again for whatever reason i don’t know myself. Like the incorrigible pursuit of sad songs some of us share. Which is directly connected, i’d say, to my need to leave the place that i love over and over again. That incomparable repeated return to winter longing songs that fill our souls with sweet sadness….ahh yes, just like the traces left by a lone always imperfect snow angel…

Or Bon Iver meeting Feist half way? i wonder if there ever was a better pair for the cause of winter longing songs. You tell me. Fast forward to 14 minutes.

http://www.abc.net.au/triplej/media/s2472786.htm

Diamond in the rough I tell you. Diamond in the rough. As my old dearest former playing-in-the-snow-partner-in-crime used to say.

Then i crossed the continent to find—one fine sunny Sunday morn in Vancouver—a song that fit just right. i was in one wonderful record store called Zulu Records (those smiling now know) and beaming about as i was, i came upon this:

That was right about the time the serendipity stopped surprising me. My life has been drawing full circles in never-quite-closing looping loops for weeks and the time had come to cease looking for a reason and embrace it like the spring i don’t deserve but is mine to have no less. Some weeks prior i had made the acquaintance of something residing ‘round the perfect cross-section of heartbreaking and hopeful (like endings and beginnings why yes i am part gemini but only half) and all these linking lines made serendipitous sense with a knowing nod to self.

Listen to this, my rambles may make more sense:

i cannot actually remember the last time i was sitting listening to someone play never having heard them before and had that feeling, that genuine sense of being blown away, left without words, made small and unable to speak. The young man filled with winter wonder is Leif Vollebekk and he’s playing in T.O. March 4th at Supermarket in Kensington. Checks him out. Just in time to celebrate the ending of February: it’s in sight, it is, it is…and what better way to commemorate than to languish in the longing, embraced like mountains by fiddle piano harmonica guitar pedals and sweet singing—and he’s just one musketeer unaccompanied. Wonder i tell you. Filled with it.

To finish off this endless ramble, i can offer nothing sweeter and sadder than Antony Hegarty doing Leonard Cohen (do excuse Cohen’s rude interrupting, it’s taken from the documentary Leonard Cohen: I’m your Man but even he must know who steals the show:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MDlMdu2gjw&feature=related

Completely. Covered. In. Shivers. i know.
Where does this man come from?
A little corner called despair.

He also made this.
Love d.

mountains and the sea, 2008

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