I’m always a little surprised when I finally make it back to my blog and see when I last posted. Oh, well. I’ve been in the Haliburton Highlands at our family cottage for most of the summer, seeing lots of our grandbabies who will soon be two years old already! Sadly, they’re not appearing on social media, but trust me when I say they are the two sweetest little girls who ever lived😊 They’re so different and changing every week as they’re learning to talk, experimenting with the potty, etc. Grandparenting truly is the best gig ever.

We’ve heard lots of live music here in the Haliburton area, listened to lots of Canoe FM, spent time in the woods as well as in and on Pine Lake most days. I’ve never lived anyplace with so much sunshine! Surprisingly, the lake level doesn’t seem to go down much, even though we’ve had very little rain all summer. We were back in Nova Scotia for a month in the middle of the summer, and people say it rained in Haliburton then, and the grass is still green, so maybe we missed it. While in NS, I got to enjoy my annual week at Beach Meadows with writer friends Marcia Barss, Jackie Halsey and Jill MacLean – lots of fog, but I did a lot of painting and the conversation is always rich. I’ve been busy uploading my soul smiles greeting cards, which you can find here: https://jancoates.ca/soul-smiles/ – I’m happy to mail them out to you (in exchange for an e-transfer:) BIG THANKS to everyone who has supported my fledgling business over the past 4 years. They’re also available at Stirling Farm Market just outside Wolfville.

Just signed a contract with Fitzhenry & Whiteside for a kids’ book about iconic Canadian artist, Doris McCarthy, scheduled for publication in 2026. Doris lived between 1910 and 2010, and I got to be writer-in-residence for a month back in 2015 at her former home on the Scarborough Bluffs, Fool’s Paradise, where I became smitten with all things Doris. As a young artist, Doris spent a lot of time here in the Highlands painting with her friend Ethel Curry, so I’m thinking of her often as I roam about.  I’ve had a couple of nice chats with the CEO of the Haliburton County Public Library system, Chris Stephenson, and his mother was a student of Doris’s in the 1960s at Central Tech – I hope to have tea with her someday since I’ve met few people lucky enough to have known Doris.

Sadly, the CEO of Fitzhenry, Sharon Fitzhenry recently passed away. She and her sister Holly Doll (who was nice enough to come to my book event at cozy bookshop, Lahave River Books, in late July, as pictured below) have been the faces of F&W for many years, and their dad started the publishing company back in 1966. A great loss to the CanLit community.

This is a very welcoming place to be, and I’ve so enjoyed our first summer in the Highlands. Haliburton only has about 1000 full-time residents, but there are over 500 lakes in the vicinity, so it’s bustling in the summer. Now that it’s fall, things will quiet down I expect. We just bought the cottage in the fall of 2022, so there’s always lots of work to do. The previous owner built it in 1975, and he basically left everything (EVERYTHING) here when he sold it. We’ve made lots of donations to SIRCH, the local community helper agency, and I’ve become a big fan of FB Marketplace, where I recently found these pinch-pleated drapes for $60, allowing me to get rid of the orange circa 1975 ones, but still use the existing tracks.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the summer of 2023 and had a chance to spend time with the people who matter most to you, as I have. I’ll leave you with the cover of the book I did for Camp Triumph in the spring, and this moose we saw close-up on Highway 118 last week. I hope he made his way back to his family as he looked kind of lost… Cheers!