The Millstone received this delightful letter from a recent visitor to our community.
We’re freshly back in London from Almonte after having delivered Johnnene Maddison’s show and her outstanding journal to the Mississippi Valley Textile Museum and attending the opening. I suppose that the idea of attending an art show that documents an artist’s emotional response to the seven years of bearing witness to her husband’s slow death might seem a touch macabre to some. But the show is about her journey through loss. Since everyone experiences loss at some time in life, being in touch with all of the feelings can help the healing and recovery process.
Alas, the big news in Almonte was not that a semi-famous London artist was having a show at the textile museum, rather it was that the crew filming the movie, “A Rooftop Christmas Tree” was still in town. I hope that they finished filming on March 5 because on March 6 the weather turned sharply warmer and snow cover was melting fast. The first two nights were bitterly cold however, and it may have seemed colder than Christmas to all the extras who had to stand and wait for so long.
It was fun to watch various things happen in Almonte that were out of the ordinary. Almonte only seems to have a few main streets along which shops are arranged, but as we drove slowly along Mill Street our first night, we saw a small crowd of people huddled by the opening to an alleyway with scoop lights and reflectors, etc. trained into the alley. There was also a very big, decorated Christmas tree at the pie-point juncture of their streets, Mill Street & Little Bridge Street. One resident told me that it seemed odd to see an American flag waving from a building, but the town was doing what it could to accommodate the production and the production crew. Another night we drove past the big Christmas tree on our way to dinner and our car was waved through, past the assembled crowd and a fully dressed Santa Clause on March 4th. Another evening at dusk, I had fun watching from our window in the Almonte Riverside Inn as a drone-mounted camera hovered, bobbed, flew in and away, capturing aerial shots of the town (and presumably the Christmas tree) from various vantage points.
For its small size, Almonte has at least two, possibly more, outstanding restaurants. We twice ate at a restaurant called the Heirloom Cafe. It was the kind of place where the waitress reels off the nightly specials and I must ask some of the meanings of the terms she uses, as I am unfamiliar with a fair number of gourmet terms. It was all good food, to be certain and thanks, Bill Chapman, for your recommendation.
We also ate at a restaurant called, “Il Postino,” which is Italian for ‘the post office,’ housed appropriately enough in the town’s old post office. While we were there it became evident to us who the head chef was and we watched him with interest. On the wall was a photograph of the head chef with our new Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau. We began to entertain each other with speculations about the head chef’s name. Johnnene said he looked like a Guido, then we sampled various other Italian names like Luigi, Vido, Giovanni, Guissepe and so on. Finally, we asked our waitress what the head chef’s name was and she replied matter-of-factly, “Oh, that’s Steve.” But she quickly acknowledged the Anglicanization from its original form that sounded very unfamiliar and its intermediate form, Stefano. Stefano was nice enough to laugh at my suggestion that he put a caption on his photograph with Trudeau that read, “Stefano e Justini.” I’m sure that Justin Trudeau, who has a pretty good sense of humour, would not take offence at having his name Romanticized in that way.
We are back home from our journey to Almonte. We must return there in mid April to retrieve Johnnene’s works, but that will be a shorter (one overnight) stay.
Ciao!
Jake Jacobik
