What is this conjured, before our eyes? 

 

Four women, a Border Collie and a quilt flying up over the hemlock forest?

 

A Peter Doig painting?

 

OR: Four women, a Border Collie named Shepody on a quilt having an ice picnic out on a gently melting lake ice, in the middle of the Boréal forest, up in the Laurentians of Québec? YES.

Helge brought a date cake made with Earl Grey tea (recipe from Lulu, omg). Judith Weissmann is quite nervous about going out on the ice -- with very good reason -- but this day was so gentle and so close to shore, and the cake was so alluring that she was able to join the picnic.

As we sat there, as we had tea and cheese and cake... and laughed like crows in the evergreens, our bums warmed the surface of the ice and got totally soaked. The winter water soaked upwards like reverse diapers. The handmade quilt had its own relationship to the sun: it drew down the molecules of heat by its wool and its dark patches. The dark patches became soaked and heavy. When we bundled up and went back to shore, a quilt pattern remained on the surface of the magical sky-lake. Lac Gustav, I love you. 

 

Oh to be in love with one another and a lake and thus the whole world. Amen.