Radio Friends

So this is where I spend a huge part of my time and where I'm sitting right now as I write this blog post.

It's Sunday. The snow, has now covered the ground again and continues to fall. I suppose it's just wrong to keep harping on it because every time I think it's over and that Spring is here for sure, it's just not.

One of my favorite things to do when the snow keeps me inside is to light the fire, put some soup on, and turn to CBC Radio One.

It feels a bit like having company, a good conversation, attending an impromptu concert, meeting budding Canadian writers, learning about the history of Reggae or just about anything you can think of that you may not think of yourself so they're there to expand your experience. Radio is intimacy.

I feel like I know the announcer/hosts: Stuart McLean (The Vinyl Cafe), Michael Enright's Sunday Edition, Eleanor Wachtel's Writers & Company. But I don't, and I prefer it that way.

It's better not to know them. It's better to think that they are the smart, interesting, intelligent, funny, fascinating people that come to chat through the radio.

I have learned firsthand that journalists are sometimes more about observing than doing and that's why they love to live vicariously through others. That may or may not be true of them. I'd just rather not know. I'd rather they be, to me, those most interesting visitors with always a special story to make me laugh, to think, to listen when it's just me, here, alone, in front of the fire during the longest winter I've experienced, my first, on Salt Spring (where for the record, it does snow).