the perfect commute

I've been working at the local highway #6 restaurant...mostly on nights with great music, which is just perfect. Local bluegrass and Hank&Lily -type bands from out of town suit me fine. After a few days of kicking back on the mountain, I left to head into Winlaw/Winlove for my first shift back.

The 20min bike ride was a source of unexpected nostalgia. There's a 50km section of rec trail that was developed along an old Slocan Valley CPR route in the mid-90s. The section that runs between the bottom of our driveway and town takes you past wetlands and along the Slocan River. For me... it was a reminder of being a kid at Sandy Beach near Lloydminster, AB. So much of the plant life is the same.

Saskatoon berries and pincherries, fireweed, tigerlilies, (a lot of my childhood adventures revolved around plant life)... my Grandpa used to spend days at a time, picking berries into a bucket around his neck, and my Grandma would use them to make delicious pies and jams. I was obsessed with figuring out which plants were edible, and would spend hours at a time (sometimes weeks) methodically going through a mental checklist: "place leaf/berry/flower against lips...wait and feel for a tingle... place leaf/berry/flower against tip of tongue...wait and...place in inside left cheek..." I guess now a kid would only have to look online for extra support in the final decision... The affection I feel for pincherry trees is something I haven't thought much about as an adult, but stuffing my face with the berries along the trail made me remember how much I used to love peeling the soft bark off with my fingernails to expose the red veins against the pale and smooth wood, and how a cheek-full of the little pits made for good spittin' wars. It made me happy to think that if this is where we raise kids, they might share some of the same adventures. I'll have to ask my Grandma for some of her recipes.

I guess this blog will serve a dual purpose for us. It will be a journal of sorts for our own purposes...detailing the joys of settling into an area that seems to hold everything we want for now and the future...and eventually a way to communicate more and more about Pokerfloat products and production methods with our customers. We're both so excited to get back to work on our designs, and will have some new products up soon.

If you are reading this blog and would like to get some mail from Winlaw, please send us your address. We'd love to send something your way...

Lauren