Here was the plan this week. Vaping – serious stuff not to be taken lightly.
As a reformed smoker of cigarettes, the perils of vaping and how these vices could easily have been avoided was my topic of choice. But then, two things got me sidetracked.
The first was a phone call from a buddy in Ontario that led me to this week’s topic change.
The second was the word: vaping, itself. I was going to forge ahead on the subject but decided to shift gears until the technology associated with spell-check caught up with the word ‘vaping’ and stopped correcting it to the word ‘vamping.’
I know next to nothing about vamping, in the same way some of you may believe I know next to nothing about most of the things I write about. Don’t get me started.
My Ontario friend happened to get momentarily distracted by the appearance of a butterfly outside his window. That led to his exhaustive description of this particular butterfly species’ normal range at this time of year, it’s colouring, usual food source… until I stopped him before he got into its mating habits, which I feared was the direction he was heading.
Being an immigrant from the United States does have its disadvantages. One is an unreasonable fear of the FBI or Google maybe listening in on my phone conversations, and misconstruing any discussion about a butterfly’s mating behaviour as inappropriate phone sex. It’s really hard keeping up with what passes for logic down there.
Butterfly talk is the opposite in seriousness to vaping, but it led to the subject of weather, a topic every Newfoundlander since the first Beothuk knows only too well from experience. As he waxed poetically about the butterfly outside his window, I began to wonder about what a similar butterfly outside my window might be doing this same early April morning, in – 5 degree weather with about six centimetres of snow on the deck. It didn’t take long before the image of one tiny butterfly wing sticking out of the snow on the deck emerged, holding a little sign on a matchstick that read “The end is near.”
There’s nothing unusual about an April snowfall. Even if it were May and it snowed, it would hardly raise an eyebrow among the initiated. But because we’ve had snow on the ground in these parts since early November, waking up on an April morning to snow can be depressing, especially when a friend in Ontario is able to relate, in real time, about the beautiful butterfly in his garden. We just have to take it, knowing full well that before we can even think about where our garden might be when we get around to raking what’s left of the yard, the existing five months of snow still on the ground has to melt.
What the heck is a butterfly? I forgot.
Then again, being in Newfoundland can mean there’s a silver lining to be found in every cloud. Take this April morning. Sure, we woke to snow. There’s no garden and if there were any butterflies, they would all be holding signs of surrender. But there was something else we didn’t have for a change. No wind. Must be the seventh day this year so far that the wind hasn’t been blowing a gale. Maybe the eighth.
God, I love this place!
