Recently we received a postcard from Natasha, aka Sarai the Mumbling Monkey. Actually, I should backtrack a little here and fill in a post that I kept meaning to write but didn’t.

Natasha hails from the other side of the continent and, before heading to grad school, decided to venture as far east as she could within Canada and check out the culture of Newfoundland. We were out of town when first she arrived, but after taking a weekend to catch up on laundry and the mundane, we invited her to stay with us.

Then it occurred to us in a blinding flash of realisation that we had absolutely nowhere for her to sleep. We ran around frantically, looking at pull-out couches and the like that weekend, but couldn’t find anything that was both within budget and decent looking. After much scrambling, we rounded up a mattress and poor Natasha ended up sleeping on the floor in my studio. I say “poor Natasha” because my tendency to have little-things-that-ought-not-to-be-vacuumed hit the floor is without peer. The room doesn’t get as much vacuuming as it really ought (pins are bad for vacuums), so even with a good sweeping, the dust still seeps out of the baseboard pores. I gave it a quick shuffle and tidy, rounded up a mattress (unfortunately not as comfortable a mattress as I would have hoped) and crossed my fingers that she wouldn’t be wretchedly miserable.

Natasha is a quiet sort of person, although I suspect that most folks would be quiet by comparison to our household. Combine that with my tendency to prattle when slightly nervous or unsure and you have chaos, complete with dogs, kid and puns.

So we took Natasha to Cape Spear, saw a sunset in Conception Bay and did a myriad of other little things. I would gladly have taken her hiking around Torbay, but my feet were still giving me grief and walking was painful.

By the time we got to her, Natasha’d already had four or five days of Folk Festival and late nights and was, I suspect, a little overwhelmed and exhausted. Add another few days of traipsing over hill and dale (we have a lot of those here) and she must have been nearly dead on her feet.

Anyway, we all had a good time and it was very neat meeting someone with whom I’d only ever corresponded by email and blogs. Katherine was fascinated by her, too, and kept chattering about Ma-tasha after the latter had left (on the same day as that airline scare in the UK – how to freak out even the calmest of travellers!).

So when a postcard arrived the other day from Natasha, Katherine was all over it. Here’s the front:

The back is a simple message saying that she’d had a good time, Wolfville has cheesy postcards, she likes puns and has found an apple U-Pick just down the street. You know, garden variety postcard stuff.

Katherine has made me read that card how many times now? Can’t possibly count. Anyway, she’s started reading it herself, only she makes up what she thinks ought to be on the back, given the front picture. Apparently she doesn’t believe that I can really read. Her most recent rendition went something like this:

I had a good time in your house. You shouldn’t eat lobster when you get sick or they will go into your stomach and gobble you from the inside. Lobster are red and dead. Love, Ma-tasha

Um, okay. Good thing I don’t like lobster…. Guess we’ll have curried chicken for supper, with corn bones (Katherine-speak for corn on the cob).

And Natasha? We really enjoyed having you come to stay. By the next time you visit, we’ll hopefully have some sort of a fold-out couch!