My son kept track of the days. He marked them off, one by one, on a paper calendar that he stuck to his bedroom wall with hockey tape. I remember him counting down the days to his April birthday. We watched Trolls World Tour that day and ate ice cream cake. And to the last day of school. What a surreal way to end the school year. And to the week we moved house. All the brown boxes, so much excitement, and so many tears. He had a Sharpie taped to the wall. And alongside the calendar were ticket stubs from a hockey game he went to see before sports got cancelled, as well as an old photograph of Jason and I, and our Schnauzer, Cecil. Antimo talks about Cecil all the time, even though there’s no way he could remember him. When we moved back to Robert Street, he stopped counting the days. He kept the calendar though, and still has it taped to the pin board above his new desk. “Best Year Ever,” is what he’s written across the top. It’s too soon to tell how the last six months will land with children. My hope is that ours don’t waste their time with the bad, and that they live with the good. I suppose that is what every parent hopes for.

Colleen Herman is inspired by some great female artists; Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, Perle Fine. I also see a fair amount of Cy Twombly in her colour rich, painterly stokes. These images, shot in her Tribeca studio, are wonderfully inspiring. I love all the gorgeous pops of colour against her crisp white walls. I read that she’ll listen to the same song again and again and then complete a canvas in a single track. “I listen to the same song over and over until it becomes a field of sound, an environment that shapes a mood.” Her paintings resonate with me, you may feel the same.

I came across the terrifically fun work of Aussie potter, Lucy Tolan today. Using both pinch and slab techniques, the artist turns lumps of clay into beautifully wonky vessels glazed in bold, primary hues. At first glance, her pieces look like papier-mâché, so textural are Tolan’s surfaces. Have a look at her work, I think you’ll really enjoy it.

I walk a lot, and when I walk, I listen to music. This past week, Tom Rosenthal’s beautiful voice has accompanied me on many a stroll around the university. A few weeks prior, it was North Carolina indie folk band, Beta Radio that set the mood on my walks. The Tallest Man On Earth is always on my favourites list. As are Fleet Foxes, Sufjan Stevens and Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros. I listen to Cinematic Orchestra’s To Build A Home on repeat –– it’s a meditation –– and the same goes for anything by Jónsi. I have really good taste in music, right? I should mention that Cyndi Lauper, Dolly Parton and Barbra Streisand all make the list, too, and that I love the soundtrack to The Greatest Showman. Sometimes, a girl needs a really good power ballad. Enter Harry Styles. Or a really good cry. Enter Bette Midler’s Wind Beneath My Wings. Are you still down with my mix tape? Dire Straits whisks me back to my 80s kitchen (it was the colour of peach fizz) and Neil Diamond reminds me of long drives on the M25 in the back of my Dad’s vintage Beamer. Tanita Tikaram re-entered the fold lately, with melancholy songs that remind me of 90s Athena, dark eyeliner, DMs and all. Zucchero and Eros Ramazzotti wrote the soundtracks to which Jason and I first fell in love, and I can’t listen to Lucio Dalla’s Tu Non Mi Basti Mai without some part of me connecting precisely to the way I felt on the day we got married. Some walks ask for Nick Cave (Into My Arms is one of my all time favourite love songs) and others demand Sia. And every now and then, I simply have to listen to John Mayer. He is my point A. Start here, and work your way out. I understand that my taste in music is as “cool” as it is “uncool.” John Mayer plays in dentist’s office. Zucchero plays in dentist’s offices in Woodbridge. Not even your Mum listens to Bette Midler. And your Dad definitely listens to Neil Diamond. Maybe he’s even tried to rope you into seeing him in concert. I have seen him in concert. And he was magnificent. Music is magnificent. What it stirs in us, the people and places it connects us to, its ability to lift us up, inspire us, teach us and transport us to another space and time. Which is why I don’t think you want a copy of my mix tape, and why I don’t want a copy of yours, and why there’s no such thing as “good” taste in music and “bad” taste in music. What matters is that the taste is your own.

We’re weathering the same storm, but our boats are very different. For some it’s a bamboo raft, for others a 200-foot schooner. I’ve thought a lot about home lately, and how one’s physical space has influenced their experience and digestion of the last six months. I’ve thought about my sister-in-law and her husband in a small condominium in downtown Toronto with two pre-schoolers and no green space. I’ve thought about the families we know with heaps of land and lake views up north. I’ve thought about multigenerational families living in tiny apartments in San Paolo. I’ve thought about front line workers living in hotel rooms. I’ve thought about Elton John in his Los Angeles mansion. I’ve also thought about the happy times I’ve spent in a tent, and how the only home that really matters is the skin we’re in. It’s like Blake Edwards said in Vanity Fair‘s Proust Questionnaire when asked where he would most like to live. “Comfortably in myself.” This morning, a local florist whose work I know and admire posted a lovely image of her country cabin accompanied by this caption. “For the past six months, I’ve lived north and in the city. What I’ve come to learn, is that there’s no hierarchy in the different environments. Only the circumference of my own being. The circle I draw around my energy. The nest of my own thoughts. The others that I invite in. The common denominator of sustenance. The nomenclature between loved ones.”

There are artists whose creativity knows no bounds. They can’t be confined to a single medium. They’re courageous, versatile and voraciously curious. The Lebanese artist,  Etel Adnan leaps to mind. At 95, she writes poetry, novels and plays, creates paintings, ceramics and large scale tapestries, and is busier than ever. “Once things leave my files,” said Adnan in the Paris Review “I never know where they are, and don’t think about them anymore, otherwise you lose your mind.” Colour is central to her art, and is what lead me to her work to begin with. Le Poids du Monde, “the weight of the world,” stopped me in my tracks. “I didn’t need to use words, but colours and lines. I didn’t need to belong to a language oriented culture but to an open form of expression.”

One of the best wisdoms I’ve received is to “say yes when you mean yes, and no when you mean no.” It is seemeingly such simple advice, but in actuality, this level of candour demands great self awareness and confidence. It also requires losing face, and maybe even a friend or two, along the way. The Turkish word nazlanmak translates as, “pretending reluctance or indifference when you’re actually willing or eager; saying no and meaning yes.” The inverse is just as common. Feigning enthusiasm for something that neither suits or serves you. I think if we all paid attention, we’d notice the little white lies, sometimes hundreds of them a day, that we unwittingly tell. It’s something I’m trying to be more mindful of, as John Mayer puts it to, “say what you need to say.”