​ 
My dears,

What a strange time.  I oscillate between a sense of defeat and hope, fear and wonder, despair and appreciation of all forms of beauty.  First - I hope you are all safe and healthy and doing your best to be cautious.  
I am doing alright, though I won't pretend that I'm not panic-stricken and grieving for what feels like the scariest crux my road life has ever been in.  There in no road, now, and road is all I've known for such a long time.  There has not been a "home" for me to hunker down in, at least not one of my own, for over a decade now, and that's miraculously not been much of an issue... until now.
As always, I am extremely lucky and grateful to have been taken in - this time by a wonderful retired couple in Winnipeg, where my last show mid-tour was before the trains got canceled and things got serious.  Frustrating to be in a city with fine musicians and not get to meet them for some local collaboration, but perhaps that will come if things start to ease up.
Not being able to perform, not being able to book more shows because it's impossible to know how long this will last, facing the financial consequences of the cancellations of wonderful shows I'd worked so hard to line up for April and May -  including what was to be my first U.S. tour, a follow-up to the Winter tour I got to do with Dan Bern across Canada just over a month ago - it has been devastating.  I am trying not to look too far into the future, and, as I think all of us are trying our best to do, in processing the constantly nerve wracking and all-encompassing adjustments every day, if not every hour, to just stay present and do the best with what we've got.
I have a brand new album, my tenth album, which I was excited to tour with and start mailing out to radio, reviewers and fans - but for now I'm happy to tell you it's out in the great big digital world, and if you're able to buy it, it would help my cause, both pragmatically and spiritually, an awful lot.  It's an album I'm very proud of that took four years to make, and has absolutely killer musicians on it from Toronto (and one from Vancouver!)
I have, as well, a brand new music video for the title track, Strange and Beautiful Things, which I animated myself with very rudimentary skills and resources, as one of the first 'projects' of things I can try to teach myself while stuck. 
And I've been writing. What else does a gal like me do?
A few new songs, 6 or 7 by now, written in the context of this bizarre and astounding isolation and being forced to stay put. I'm including one here for you to hear, and there are more of them posted on facebook, instagram, and youtube.
I'll be releasing them as some kind of album on bandcamp eventually ,as I'm also teaching myself some very basic recording skills with a new microphone for my laptop.
It is a lot to process, for each of us it means something different, but for all of us it's overwhelming to try to understand, in all its implications, and deal with, with no certainty of duration.
But we are strong, us humans - and incredibly creative and resilient and there are examples all around of how people are doing their best to make the best.
And so am I.  And the one thing that's always been there for me is song, so it is song, and more song, that I continue to share with you.
With love and appreciation to you, and with hopes of the good things renewing,
Peace,
- Orit

  
When people have asked me where I live, I used to joke “on the Greyhound.”   The first time I heard, “Kathy, I said as we boarded the Greyhound in Pittsburgh,” from Simon & Garfunkel’s “America,”  I thought the Greyhound was cool.   The only time I rode it as a child was with my two sisters, from Calgary to Vancouver and back, when we went to visit my grandparents.   On the way back there was an avalanche in Revelstoke, which created a five-hour detour.  When my parents came to the station in Calgary to pick us up and we weren’t there, they went to the counter and asked if there was any information. Apparently, the woman at the counter suggested that we had probably just run away from home.  My poor mother said we weren’t those kinds of kids, and the woman said that all parents think that.  Customer service has never been the strong-point of the Ol’ Blue Chariot, but even at thirteen years old I remember the special feeling I got reading my book in the wee hours of the night, riding through the Rockies in the darkness with my overhead light on.  A soldier across the aisle had asked me what I was reading.  It felt like an adventure.  They even gave out granola bars and juice boxes in those days and showed movies.  That was before they introduced Wi-Fi and everyone had their own device.

I recently found a pencil drawing I made at about seventeen years old.  It was at one of a few art-therapy sessions I was sent to because, well, let’s just say, I was feeling a bit more distraught than usual for a while.  The drawing was faint, but it was of a girl leaning her head against a bus window, with a somewhat blank stare.  I remember the therapist asking me where the girl was going.  “I don’t know,” I said. “She just likes the ride.”  If there is foreshadowing in life, that was surely a moment of it.

Years later, when I decided to go full-time with my music, I confided in a fellow singer-songwriter whom I had met in Toronto.  He laughed and said there was no way I could be a Canadian touring artist without a car and a driver’s license.   That Greyhound Discovery Pass was like the universe saying, “Oh yeah? Watch her!”

Indeed, the best thing that happened to me, as far as I was concerned, was discovering “The Discovery Pass.”   Greyhound used to issue it as an option instead of individual tickets, and I would pay $600 for two months of unlimited Greyhound travel in any direction.   This included the States, but without a proper work-permit to go play shows there, I never did, and I had enough to do in Canada anyway.  This was my ticket, no pun intended, to a full-time music career without an agent, manager and publicist.  All I needed were a handful of guaranty gigs (meaning, agreed-upon pay regardless of turn-out), and the rest could be filled with pass-the-hat or ticket gigs which I could afford to risk because I didn’t have to pay any extra money to travel to them.  I was couch-surfing while touring anyway, and getting pretty hefty favours as far as recordings prices went, so really, those six hundred dollars were my only expense other than pressing CDs, the odd bar of soap and toothpaste, tampons, and the food and drink which, at least once a day, if it was a gig-day, I often didn’t have to pay for anyway.

God, I rode that bus everywhere.  Toronto to Thunder Bay, (21 hours), sometimes with a stop in Sault St. Marie, Thunder Bay to Winnipeg or Saskatoon, from there to Calgary, or Edmonton, and through the various towns of the Okanogan and British Columbia, to Vancouver, to Vancouver Island, and back again.   I became acquainted with the tiniest of stops, the fifty-cent second hand, terrible romance novels in the Wawa corner store pit-stop, the vending machines in North Bay where there was a one-hour wait at five in the morning with nobody working there, the graffiti at the Red Deer station that said “Have no Fear, Have Music,” the convenience store at the stop between Toronto and Ottawa that reeked so badly of moth balls, whatever food you bought there tasted like them too, and the cowboy saloon-style convenience store in the middle of the Rockies on the way to Nelson, that advertised, “now selling Samosas.”

I once had a 24-hour ride that popped me out in Brandon, Manitoba, to play a bar-gig until 1.a.m., only to get on again at 2.am. to head to Alberta, another 24-hour ride.  I once had a four-hour wait between the gig and the 6.am. departure from Golden, B.C., where the gas-station store worker drank vodka and “jammed” with me, playing a bucket as a drum while I sang some Johnny Cash song at his request.  I would play a gig in Peterborough, and then hop on at 4.am. and continue on to Toronto for a matinee show the next say.  I rolled around through the Okanogan, and had a six hour wait in Kelowna, even though I was only one hour away from Penticton where I needed to be.    I rode it to the States and back twice, (boarder patrol on a Greyhound is quite a circus, let me tell you).     Some have asked if I feel safe on it, especially after that horrific and infamous beheading, but I have lived in Jerusalem where, for a period, buses were blowing up or getting shot at every few days, so one freak occurrence in Canada wasn’t going to phase me.

I’ve seen sunrises and sunsets over mountains, prairies and forests, thunderstorms and blizzards, all through Greyhound bus windows.  I have heard snippets of hundreds of strange conversations about family feuds, prison, drugs, reunions and heartbreaks. I’ve heard people talking to their loved ones on their cell phones, and at annoying times, listening to their music too loudly through headphones. I’ve heard babies cry and get comforted, seen people be helpful or pretend to be sleeping so they wouldn’t have to give up the seat next to theirs.   I’ve stood and smoked cigarettes in pit-stop parking lots, in silence with the other smokers, or in smokers’ conversations where for six or seven minutes you share some life-story and then get back on the bus to your seats never to meet again    I’ve squatted over moving toilets after too much coffee and pumped liberal amounts of sanitising gel onto my hands, can conjure the smell of the cleaner all the buses use. The smell lives in some part of my brain like it’s as common as the smell of a rose. I’ve stepped over many pairs of legs of sleeping passengers who spread across the aisle for something akin to comfort, and I have heard the variations of dozens of bus-drivers giving their welcome-aboard spiel, some with good senses of humour, some with bad ones, and some with none at all.  One driver sang John Prine songs into the announcement microphone as we arrived into each stop.

The Greyhound may be crazy, but it was kind of my one consistent home.  For someone who travels pretty much full time, I still get anxious about each journey:  The packing, the prepping, the timing of getting to the station on time, the worry over whether they’ll let me bring the guitar on board rather than put it with the luggage, which, during winter means it’s in a freezing cold place for hours, on top of bouncing around with suitcases.  I was once told by a station official that I couldn’t bring it on board because it could potentially be used as a weapon.  I looked at her like it was obviously crazy and she said “if you don’t believe me I can show you the policy in writing.”  Those Greyhound workers in the stations can be awfully power-trippy and nonsensical.   I just got on the bus with the guitar anyway.  The Greyhound is one of the only places where I am actually defiant, though I’m smartly quiet about it.   I worry about whether my luggage is overweight and whether I’ll be charged for it, or if they’ll notice that I have one too many carry-ons.   And there is always some anxiety about shifting scenery, leaving whomever I’ve been staying with and arriving in the next place with the next set of people.  

But when I board the bus and nestle into my seat, (preferably a window seat so there is something to lean on, and preferably, two seats to myself which makes all the difference in the world to comfort), there is this incredible wave of relief. I’m on, I’m seated, and now I can just sit there and not worry about anything until the ride is over.  It’s out of my hands, and that is a surprisingly glorious feeling.  The letting go of control for a set number of hours has its own therapeutic value.

When I’m not on the Greyhound, except for the very rare times I am house-sitting alone, I am always around people, a guest in their space.  There is always conversation, and a lot of it.  These conversations are intense experiences of human encounter and they give me much to think about, to ponder and philosophise, and when I’m going from show to show and home to home, there is often not enough time to process it.    Tour-exhaustion has as much to do with this as it does with performance fatigue. Those several-hour stretches on the bus have been for me like a kind of sanctuary, where the turning wheels below me allow my mind to do the same without any interruption.   There ain’t nothing like staring out a window for hours with scenery rolling by to clear the mind.

The pattern is almost always the same. I put the guitar in the overhead compartment, placing my to-go mug of coffee on the seat, (and often spilling some, I’ve learned to bring napkins).  My carry-on goes by my feet, my purse as a kind of pillow.   I watch as other people board and let my mind invent little stories about each one.   I pray nobody sits beside me so I will have more room.  I settle in and get comfortable, and I use that term very loosely. Over time I have nearly perfected the as-close-to-comfortable-as-one-can-get techniques.  It is as though Greyhound seats were designed by a torture-specialist.  No matter how you try to position yourself for something akin to sleep, there is always, always something jabbing you somewhere.  I have a travel neck-pillow that I move from neck to back and even under my butt sometimes, all in the efforts to prevent pain in the various parts of my body that, over the years, have begun to complain more. And I always bring an extra two sweaters to try and soften the hard bits that dig into me, the arm-rest, or the window-sill.

I have also nearly perfected my bus snacks, which is no small feat when you’ve discovered, twenty years too late, that you have always had a wheat allergy.  It’s just as well, since the only stops for food the bus makes are in fast food joints, or Tim Horton's, (I won’t pretend I don’t miss the doughnuts, though). The only restaurants are the Husky station in Golden, B.C. and the diner in North Battleford, Saskatchewan, where there’s a statue of Spock from Star Trek, and the greasiest food I’ve ever had in my life.   Sure, the odd treat is ok, but if you spend as much time on the Greyhound as I have, you don’t really want to partake in those indulgences lest you end up with premature heart disease.  Those who have seen me off to the station have likely seen me prepare my feast of a dozen rice-cake and peanut butter sandwiches.  Those things would survive an apocalypse.  Their only downside is that they leave you looking like you’ve been through some kind of Styrofoam explosion.

And so, as prepared as can be, I wait for the bus to start rolling.  I wait for the announcements to come and go, and then I lean my head against the window and fall into something like sleep.  It is not quite sleep. It is almost more like a meditation.  It feels very much like I enter some other layer of consciousness where the thoughts in my head sort themselves out without any direction from me.  It feels like a clearing of conversational debris, a sweeping, an unconscious synthesising. All the worries tumble around and, one by one, they leave and I come out of it feeling mentally refreshed and ready to think about something in a focused way.  When I come to, or wake up, I usually take out my little laptop. 

In the beginning there was never Wi-Fi on the buses, so I would either listen to tracks I was working on, or write long journal entries, poems and sometimes songs.  I would think about where I had been, I would plan what to say at my next show, I would daydream about my future and try to sort out what felt unresolved in my past.  I would try to find meaning in the short-term memories of where I had just been, and in the long-term memories that rose in me out of a subconscious suggestion of relevance.  Rolling along on the Trans Canada Highway seemed to be the perfect place to do this because it was like the concretisation of the metaphor of being on life’s journey.  I was on the road, but really, I was, in those moments and hours, on the actual road.

I had, long ago, on a bus from Ottawa to Montreal, written a spoken-word piece that never saw the light of day. The notebook it was in got lost and I was never quite able to remember it, but it went something like this:
 
“On the bus from North Bay to Alberta,
Or from Antwerp to Berlin,
I’m not in the place I’m going to
nor where I have just been,
The highway stretching out for miles
Just kind of sets me free,
Because I am just now,
But too, just was, and soon will be.
When I die, just spread my ashes where the cargo loads,
So I don’t have to choose a place, I’ll just stay on the roads.”
 
A few years ago, I went with my Discovery Pass to the counter in order to get my luggage tag.  The guy said, very nonchalantly, “oh we’re not doing those anymore after October.”   He had no idea who he was saying that too, and I had no idea what I was going to do.    It was around that time I found out that Via Rail had an on-board entertainment program, which meant if I got accepted, I could travel Toronto to Vancouver, or Montreal to Halifax, for free in exchange for performing for the passengers.  I have been a Via performer ever since, which has been an incredible experience but has also meant I don’t stop in as many towns along the way.   Thunder Bay, which was at least a once-a-year stop, or Brandon, or even Winnipeg, just don’t end up happening anymore.    But I’ve still been riding Ol’ Blue all over Alberta and British Columbia, still living the humble dream of sharing my songs and stories with the people of Canada, still able to afford it despite the measly income playing these shows provides.

And now I have read that come this October, the Greyhound will discontinue altogether from Saskatchewan Westward.    Even if I learn how to drive, I won’t realistically be able to go from never having driven to suddenly driving through the Rockies alone, and how will I be able to afford a car, and gas, and insurance?  I would have to make a lot more money doing what I do, for that scenario or for hiring a driver, and who in their right mind would come along on my never-ending tour?   At a time where venues are paying less if not closing down altogether, and people are paying for music less because they can download it illegally or stream it, riding the Greyhound was my answer to the dire financial reality of music-as-income.   With the bus gone, my touring survival remains to be seen.

But where there’s a will, there’s a way.  I’ve had many obstacles before and persevered, and so I am very curious to see what the next chapter brings.  But one thing is for sure.  The Greyhound is as imprinted on my ass as it is in my heart and mind.  This is the end of an era, and I shall look back on it with fond memories of hours and hours and years and years, during which my little determined self said, “Yes, I can do this. Yes, I WILL do this,” all while staring out a window, taking in that one-and-only smell of Greyhound disinfectant.  
 
 

Gillian Snider’s home was not the first I entered in my travels, but its warmth and colours and the stories its walls told spoke so deeply to me, it was the first I sat down in to write about houses.   I had arrived that day by Greyhound bus on a cross-Canada tour, pulled my giant rolling suitcase, which I lived out of, over gravelly back-streets, with one wheel broken and my guitar case slung over my shoulder, along with my purse which was heavy with my laptop.  Gillian wouldn’t be home from work for another few hours. We had not yet met.  A bar owner in Thunder Bay named Sheila, who hosted several touring musicians, had told me that if I was going to Saskatoon I should ask Gillian if I could play a house concert.  I had followed up on her advice, and now here I was. 
Gillian had instructed me to let myself in and to say the dogs’ names, Dante and Clyde, so they might stop barking when I came through the door.  They did not bark at all, as it turned out.  They were gigantic and gorgeous, the one black and the other mottled.  I said hello to both of them and reached out my arm, low so as not to be threatening, so they could come and lick my hand.  Their friendly tail-wagging welcome made me glad.  It was uncomplicated, as far as weary arrivals go. No talking necessary.
I was relieved to close the door behind me and free myself from my coat and my luggage and boots.  I made myself a cup of tea with the red, old-fashioned kettle that was there on the stove.  The tea was easy to find in the white wooden cupboards, as were the mugs. I selected a dark ceramic one, noting that the choosing of a mug was always something I did with great consideration.  The fridge, where I looked for milk for my tea, was packed to the gills.   The kitchen floor was checkered and the whole room was charmingly unmodern.  Not too clean, not too dirty.  Just right.
The dogs settled in the living room, flopped down on the large, soft couches.  There were two cats, I was told, but they had not revealed themselves yet.  The room was dim and full of pet hair. There were dark, evocative paintings on the wall, and there was a blue rug beneath the old-fashioned trunk-turned-coffee table.  Plants with outstretched vines, a piano, guitar, accordion, and a music stand all stood perfectly positioned on the wooden floor.  It looked like a scene from a play that was about to begin, and was indeed, where I would be playing.
The adjacent dining room was brighter.  A big, oval wooden table stood at its centre, taking up most of the room, and there was a large book-case taking up most of the far wall, brimming over with books of all sorts, some new and some tattered and old, titles that beckoned me to stay longer than I could.   A window overlooked the back yard, and the wall that framed the kitchen doorway had photographs and children’s drawings, knick-knacks, and posters.   There was hardly an empty space to be found.
Everywhere my eyes looked, there was the cluttered accumulation of a family and music life lived.  Still alone, I could almost hear the echoes of children playing and growing, the clunking of dishes, the footsteps.  It was magical.  There was so much presence of life spilling from every saved object and item, and it occurred to me that it had not become this way all at once.  It sank in that many years of living had created this.
 I had not seen a house like this in quite some time.   Most of the places I had been staying in were apartments of students and musicians.  There’d been guitars and records and beer bottles but hardly any books, and certainly no children’s drawings.  This was a house I could relate to, though the ones I grew up in never accumulated quite as many artifacts.  My family had moved every few years and each of our homes gave glimpses only of various family chapters.   This was a house like the ones I used to babysit in when I was earning money in my teenage years.  This was a house like the ones I used to imagine having, the type of house I used to want before the road became my home.  This house was a home.  It evoked both comfort and a twinge of sorrow.
I took out my notebook to describe it because I realised it moved me to witness it in the midst of my transitory travels, and it wasn’t just personal, about what I used to imagine and never got.  It was about my fascination with these units of shelter where babies are raised thinking it is their whole universe, that children run in and out of with muddy shoes and gushing stories, between school and friends and activities, then teenagers, then adults returning for visits.   It was about the joys and sorrows that the walls contain over years.  It was about the structures that house the meaning of time itself.
After the show, where several people had gathered to listen to my songs, eat snacks from trays and plates and talk about life, when only Gillian and I were left in the kitchen, we began the great conversation, filling each other in on our lives.  We had interesting points of intersection that made us feel like the greatest of friends.  Such different backgrounds, and yet we had had similar experiences, similar losses, similar reactions and thoughts and reflections.  I talked about one day having a home and she talked about one day leaving the one we were standing in.
The shower upstairs, where I went to soothe my tired muscles before going to bed, had a selection of soaps and body washes, shampoos and conditioners and cleansers and razors and I thought about how all the bathrooms I see have different ones, and how people go out and buy these products with their various, coloured packaging and their many scents. I wondered how they made their choices, and how so many of us seldom finish one product before we buy another, wanting a change, but not wanting to let the old one go.  I stood under the hot water and opened a few to smell them, as if I could get to know about life itself if I did.  My senses were grateful for the fragrant information.
I missed my old bathroom collection.   I missed my old books.  I missed the idea that I would one day have a dog or a cat or maybe even children.  But I also knew how much I loved seeing so many homes, and loved that I would see so many more, that I would stand in other kitchens with other interesting people, getting to know myself better as they talked about themselves.  I thought about the fact that I did not want Gillian to leave one day, because I wanted this house to be here forever for me to keep visiting.  I knew it didn’t work that way.  I wondered if I would ever live somewhere again.
I’ve seen the inside of several other fridges since then.  I have spoken to many more people about their lives and mine, while sitting at their dining room table eating their food.  I have stood in many more showers smelling the soap in an effort to absorb who they are into my understanding.   I have pet many more dogs and cats, played with more babies, glanced with fascination at book titles on other people’s shelves, paintings on other people’s walls, and photographs, and drawings.  I have figured out ovens, and faucets, and coffee machines, found the kettle and tea and chosen mugs for myself to drink out of, found the light switches in the dark, fumbling.  I have slept on many beds and couches knowing my home is not a unit of shelter but hundreds of different ones belonging to others, spread over cities and countries and continents. I have left and returned to the same ones, and encountered new ones on each leg of my long journey, and I have been grateful beyond words for the privilege to visit in every single one.
This morning I read that Gillian’s house had a fire.  Thankfully, everyone, including the pets, was rescued. They were told, at first, that the house would have to be demolished, but as it turns out, they will be able to salvage the structure with some rebuilding.  It is too early to tell.  I can’t imagine any of the books survived, and it is heartbreaking to think of the children’s drawings gone, and all those records and plants.  Gillian remains the stoic and positive person I’ve known her to be, grateful that everyone is safe.
It was just today I was sifting through boxes of mine at my parents’ place, wondering why I’ve kept old university essays of mine, old letters and photographs. If I had a home, they might be out on display, but as it stands, they are just filed away.  For the first time in years it occurred to me that I know who I am without these old artifacts, that whatever traces of me I have clung to by hanging on to them, will be with me regardless, integrated into the very fabric of my soul.   
Gillian told me that the firefighters saved the musical instruments after they got all the pets out to safety.  I had offered her my accordion, which sits at a friend’s place in Berlin, in case hers hadn’t survived.  When I found out the instruments were rescued I was not only relieved, I thought it a marvellously poetic gesture on the part of the firefighters.
What matters most? That everyone is safe, yes, but that we can keep playing music, literally and figuratively, is what gives us that crucial vitality, our meaning. The songs we sing and the stories we tell keep every piece of evidence that we have lived lives and we are still thriving.  Artifacts are beautiful to hold and show, to hang on walls, but they disintegrate and fade, are vulnerable to the elements, just as our very bodies are, here for a time, then gone.   If the stories and songs of our lives and loves can survive and still be shared, we have not lost a thing. We are lucky. 
If this house doesn’t make it, I will be visiting Gillian wherever she creates her new home.  Perhaps, one day, she will visit me in mine.  Perhaps I will bring her a book as a gift, or some fragrant soap.  Perhaps we will draw new pictures.