For Catherine.

Let me be the first to wish Lucy Maud Montgomery (author of the Anne of Green Gables saga) a happy 131st birthday! The same goes to Winston Churchill.

These are important people to have linked this way, as both, in their way remind me of one of my bosom companions – Catherine, the belle of the Island. (L.M. was a major specter haunting her thesis, and Winnie hung on her office wall, very likely original to the plaster from the 40s in McMaster’s Uni Hall.)

If Catherine were an Avonlea character, she would be Catherine of the Dunes, all loquacious and optimistic. I’d be Holly of the Murky Basement, the dirty-faced waif of indiscriminate fence-jumper descent; the brat who was purchased to do scullery work for the widow McDonnell (but admirable in my feistiness, and ability to truck around crags without shoes). She’d be a strawberry blonde, but really want dramatic black hair like mine. But, of course, I would really think blonde was better… (Ah, colonial fantasies, there, eh?) We’d be best friends, despite our differences, and she’d see past social standing, teach me to read Tennyson, and then we’d foil a pirates’ plan to smuggle rum out of the Cove…

Friendship is a wonderful thing, and never goes out of style.
It can’t be harmed by difference, distance, or unemployment.
Nor does it lose its value as we age.

So, though this started as a note to these two dead folks, it has turned into a “Hello” for the very-much-alive, and lively, Cate, who is currently vying for presidency of the CBC. All love and best wishes, for the girl from away!

Go, girl, go!