Free The Vinyl Café Notebooks by Stuart Mclean Page A

From salt mines in Windsor and Goderich, Ontario, from Pugwash, Nova Scotia, and from the Magdalen Islands, Canada produces more salt than it needs—enough surplus to export tons to the United States.
    This salt, the salt we send abroad and the salt we see on the streets, the salt we pass around our tables, the salt that I pick out of my dog’s paws, all comes from ancient deposits, remnants of long-forgotten oceans.
    And now, I read, that if the mines ever ran out, there is enough salt suspended in the world’s oceans to make five fullsized relief models of Europe.
    So we don’t feel profligate when, in the darkness of December, we greet snow by scattering salt at our feet. And, as we do, we may well be reaching back to some ancient memory, and saying, in our own way, that these streets where we live are holy streets, worthy of keeping clear; and the white florets of salt that marble them in the cold winter mornings are there to remind us that we are the salt of the earth; and the trucks criss-crossing the city in the winternights are prayer trucks, reminding us in the dark of the winter, when the snow piles around us, that we have nothing to fear, that we are not alone, that we are here for each other, for there is salt between us .
    5 February 2000

FEBRUARY
    February is the oddest of the months and not my favourite. And here, stuck in the middle of it, I am looking forward to the day when I can watch February fade into the rear-view mirror of the year.
    I know February does have Valentine’s Day, which recommends it to some—to the glad spenders, and the hawkers of roses, and all the fancy dancers who know the right things to say to a girl or to a boy when they catch their eye—but I’m with Carl Sandburg on this: Valentine’s Day has taught me more about the taste of cabbage than the mystery of roses.
    It is the month my mother was born, but apart from that, and the odd flutter from Sandburg’s little white bird of love, February has added up to just too much winter. The Fathers of Confederation, or the trickster Raven, or whoever it was who designed the month must have agreed. They did their best to whittle away at it, doling out twenty-eight meagre days in most years, grudgingly handing out a twenty-ninth from time to time. Why they didn’t just do away with the whole month while they were at it, and add the twenty-eight days to say, June, when love is really in the air, or September, a month I have always thought should be longer, is beyond me.
    But they didn’t, and we are stuck with it, and this year, being one of the years when February has twenty-nine days instead of twenty-eight, we are stuck with it more than ever.
    It is a curious construction, this notion that a month can accordion in and out every four years—I don’t know how they got that past the board of regents. You are commissioned to codify the year, to design a system that makes the year solid and reliable, and you do that eleven out of twelve months, but then it’s as if you shrug and say, “What the heck? I’m hungry. I’m going home.” You leave February to some maniac from the basement who has radical theories about child-rearing, and what you should eat for breakfast, and has been just waiting for a chance like this. He gets February in a thumb grip, and this is what we are left with: a month that can’t keep track of itself. A month that loses days willy-nilly. Days fluttering out the backpack of the month and vanishing into thin air like those school notices your kids never bring home.
    It’s Leap Year, which any sensible person might conclude means we leap ahead, skip out of February a day early in our headlong lunge to spring, but this being February—a month, upon reflection, I am beginning to think of as more perverse than odd—it means our leap is a leap to nowhere, a leap to where we started, stuck in this month, sometimes a day short, sometimes with more days on our hands than we want. Perhaps the best idea this