Jill Murray

Welcome back to the blog. Did you even know I was gone? I’m just back from Salem, MA, where the venerable iMo was getting married to the honourable Chad Gambone. I was the maid of honour. I’m going to spend this week sharing photos and commentary from the weekend, and maybe even end with the speech I scrounged up the nerve to make at the reception. (Eee! Public Speaking.)

Massachusetts is such a funny place. First of all, I can barely spell it. Then there’s the fact that the road “system” there was designed primarily to promote the sale of GPS navigation systems.

No word of a lie, if you get lost in MA, the only appropriate action is to immediately stop and trace your path back to the last place where you remember feeling like you knew where you were going, then ask for directions. Unlike diving through, say, Ontario, which is just one big giant grid, you must never assume you can continue driving and the problem will eventually sort itself out. Once on an MA highway, I was driving North, when suddenly, without even changing lanes, I started seeing signs indicating that I was heading southward. All the locals knew that if you wanted to keep going North, you had to exit the highway and rejoin it at a different point. In MA, not exiting is simply not sufficient reason to assume you’re still on the road.

Luckily, when we landed at the airport in Boston, my dad, who also lives there, picked us up and drove us to Salem, which allowed me to catputre the above blurry photo Lynn.

It’s a shame the only photo I could grab was a blurry photo, because what the sign says on that imposing stone barn is “Authentic Canadian Sheds,” which some have suggested means they import sheds directly from Canadian Tire.

I had no idea The Shed was a typically Canadian structure, or that maybe we make our sheds like no other nation on Earth. Certainly, my family has never owned a shed, being in position of a dazzling garage, nor have my friends’ families. I am willing to concede that some of our neighbors did, in fact, have sheds. However, I’d like to point out that this Authentic Canadian Shed store appears to my eye many times more opulent and established than Shed FX (yes, Shed FX. There’s a sore called Shed FX), off the highway in (Tweed?) Ontario, in Canada. Do not other cultures typically have a need to house garden tools? Do they not have precipitation and therefore a risk of rust? Or is the shed, like the Canadarm, one of our country’s proudest innovations?